Cortical thickness measurement from magnetic resonance images using partial volume estimation

Measurement of the cortical thickness from 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can aid diagnosis and longitudinal studies of a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases. We estimate the cortical thickness using a Laplacian approach whereby equipotentials analogous to layers of tissue are computed. The thickness is then obtained using an Eulerian approach where partial differential equations (PDE) are solved, avoiding the explicit tracing of trajectories along the streamlines gradient. This method has the advantage of being relatively fast and insure unique correspondence points between the inner and outer boundaries of the cortex. The original method is challenged when the thickness of the cortex is of the same order of magnitude as the image resolution since partial volume (PV) effect is not taken into account at the gray matter (GM) boundaries. We propose a novel way to take into account PV which improves substantially accuracy and robustness. We model PV by computing a mixture of pure Gaussian probability distributions and use this estimate to initialize the cortical thickness estimation. On synthetic phantoms experiments, the errors were divided by three while reproducibility was improved when the same patients was scanned three consecutive times.