Gyral folding pattern analysis via surface profiling

Human cortical folding pattern has been studied for decades. This paper proposes a gyrus scale folding pattern analysis technique via cortical surface profiling. Firstly, we sample the cortical surface into 2D profiles and model them using power function. This step provides both the flexibility of representing arbitrary shape by profiling and the compactness of representing shape by parametric modeling. Secondly, based on the estimated model parameters, we extract affine-invariant features on the cortical surface and apply the affinity propagation clustering algorithm to parcellate the cortex into regions with different shape patterns. Finally, a second-round surface profiling is performed on the parcellated cortical regions, and the number of hinges is detected to describe the gyral folding pattern. Experiments demonstrate that our method could successfully classify human gyri into 2-hinge, 3-hinge and 4-hinge gyri. The proposed method has the potential to significantly contribute to automatic segmentation and recognition of cortical gyri.