Efficient representation of cortical convolutions for the analysis of brain surface topology

Various time efficient procedures were developed allowing to calculate planar representations of the brain in MR and CT clearly conveying the whole surface topology. For the comparison of the provided techniques we present additional complex functionality for the transformation of cortical convolutions between different representations after extracting and marking them manually or automatically. This includes re–projection to the original volume data in order to compare our approach to results obtained with direct volume rendering. Considering brain information exclusively, and ensuring a standardized orientation for the inter–patient comparison different segmentation and registration procedures are provided for the pre–processing. All implementation was integrated in a flexible and modular extensible platform allowing for convenient manipulation and visualization.