Software Pipeline for Midsagittal Corpus Callosum Thickness Profile Processing: Automated Segmentation, Manual Editor, Thickness Profile Generator, Group-Wise Statistical Comparison and Results Display

Abstract

This paper presents a fully automated pipeline for thickness profile evaluation and analysis of the human corpus callosum (CC) in 3D structural T1-weighted magnetic resonance images. The pipeline performs the following sequence of steps: midsagittal plane extraction, CC segmentation algorithm, quality control tool, thickness profile generation, statistical analysis and results figure generator. The CC segmentation algorithm is a novel technique that is based on a template-based initialisation with refinement using mathematical morphology operations. The algorithm is demonstrated to have high segmentation accuracy when compared to manual segmentations on two large, publicly available datasets..