Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 53, Issue 1, 15 October 2010, Pages 1-15
NeuroImage

Automatic parcellation of human cortical gyri and sulci using standard anatomical nomenclature

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.06.010Get rights and content

Abstract

Precise localization of sulco-gyral structures of the human cerebral cortex is important for the interpretation of morpho-functional data, but requires anatomical expertise and is time consuming because of the brain's geometric complexity. Software developed to automatically identify sulco-gyral structures has improved substantially as a result of techniques providing topologically correct reconstructions permitting inflated views of the human brain. Here we describe a complete parcellation of the cortical surface using standard internationally accepted nomenclature and criteria. This parcellation is available in the FreeSurfer package. First, a computer-assisted hand parcellation classified each vertex as sulcal or gyral, and these were then subparcellated into 74 labels per hemisphere. Twelve datasets were used to develop rules and algorithms (reported here) that produced labels consistent with anatomical rules as well as automated computational parcellation. The final parcellation was used to build an atlas for automatically labeling the whole cerebral cortex. This atlas was used to label an additional 12 datasets, which were found to have good concordance with manual labels. This paper presents a precisely defined method for automatically labeling the cortical surface in standard terminology.

Research highlights

►This atlas automatically provides 74 sulco-gyral structures per hemisphere. ►Automated and manual parcellations are concordant for 85% of the cortex ►This tool is included in FreeSurfer package (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/).

Section snippets

Subjects — scanning procedure

Twenty-four healthy right-handed volunteers were included in this study: 12 male (aged 18–25 years, mean 21.67 year) and 12 female (21–33 year-old, mean 25.33 years). They were scanned on a 1.5 T Siemens Sonata scanner. Two high-resolution whole-head T1 weighted MPRAGE scans were collected: TR = 2730 ms, TE = 3.39 ms, Flip angle = 7°, slice thickness = 1.3 mm, 128 slices, FOV = 256 mm × 256 mm, matrix = 256 × 256). These parameters were empirically optimized for contrast between gray matter, white matter and

Results

We here present the final improved parcellation (Table 1) used to manually label the Training set used by the automated labeling procedure distributed with the FreeSurfer package since August 2009 (Freesurfer v4.5, aparc.a2009s/Destrieux.simple.2009-07-29.gcs atlas). In the text, the common name of each parcellation unit was bold italic type, alternative anatomical names found in the literature were given in parentheses (), and were followed in square brackets [ ] by the label used in the

Discussion

In classical textbooks (Duvernoy et al., 1991, Ono et al., 1990) and in many atlases used in the neuroimaging community (Desikan et al., 2006, Lancaster et al., 1997, Talairach and Tournoux, 1988), gyri are defined as the cortex joining the bottom of two neighboring sulci, sulci being only consider as virtual landmarks between them. Nevertheless, the brain is more “sulcal” than “gyral”, since one half to two thirds of the cortical surface is hidden in the sulci and in the lateral fossa of the

Conflict of interest

Dr. Halgren is a founder of, holds equity in, and serves on the board of directors for CorTechs Labs, Inc. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by the University of California, San Diego in accordance with its conflict of interest policies.

Dr. Dale is a founder of, holds equity in, and serves on the scientific advisory board for CorTechs Labs, Inc. The terms of this arrangement have been reviewed and approved by the University of California, San Diego in accordance with

Acknowledgments

We thank Henry Duvernoy, MD, Besançon, France, for his advice in cerebral cortex nomenclature, and for proofreading the manuscript, and Jacqueline Vons, PhD, Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance, Université François Rabelais de Tours, for her translation of (Vesalius, 1543).

This work was supported by: Centre Hospitalier Régional et Universitaire de Tours, Tours, France; National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke [R01 NS18741, R01 NS052585]; National Center for Research

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