Atlas-based neuroinformatics via MRI: harnessing information from past clinical cases and quantitative image analysis for patient care.

With the ever-increasing amount of anatomical information radiologists have to evaluate for routine diagnoses, computational support that facilitates more efficient education and clinical decision making is highly desired. Despite the rapid progress of image analysis technologies for magnetic resonance imaging of the human brain, these methods have not been widely adopted for clinical diagnoses. To bring computational support into the clinical arena, we need to understand the decision-making process employed by well-trained clinicians and develop tools to simulate that process. In this review, we discuss the potential of atlas-based clinical neuroinformatics, which consists of annotated databases of anatomical measurements grouped according to their morphometric phenotypes and coupled with the clinical informatics upon which their diagnostic groupings are based. As these are indexed via parametric representations, we can use image retrieval tools to search for phenotypes along with their clinical metadata. The review covers the current technology, preliminary data, and future directions of this field.