Midsagittal plane extraction from brain images based on 3D SIFT.

Midsagittal plane (MSP) extraction from 3D brain images is considered as a promising technique for human brain symmetry analysis. In this paper, we present a fast and robust MSP extraction method based on 3D scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT). Unlike the existing brain MSP extraction methods, which mainly rely on the gray similarity, 3D edge registration or parameterized surface matching to determine the fissure plane, our proposed method is based on distinctive 3D SIFT features, in which the fissure plane is determined by parallel 3D SIFT matching and iterative least-median of squares plane regression. By considering the relative scales, orientations and flipped descriptors between two 3D SIFT features, we propose a novel metric to measure the symmetry magnitude for 3D SIFT features. By clustering and indexing the extracted SIFT features using a k-dimensional tree (KD-tree) implemented on graphics processing units, we can match multiple pairs of 3D SIFT features in parallel and solve the optimal MSP on-the-fly. The proposed method is evaluated by synthetic and in vivo datasets, of normal and pathological cases, and validated by comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrated that our method has achieved a real-time performance with better accuracy yielding an average yaw angle error below 0.91° and an average roll angle error no more than 0.89°.