Cortical and vascular probability maps for analysis of human brain in computed tomography images

In the field of medical imaging, atlases are generally used for computer-aided anatomical and functional parcellation of a brain, and for distinguishing which tissue is normal and which is pathologic. The purpose of this paper is to create a set of human brain atlas probability maps, which would be publicly available for clinical and research community and could be applied to computer tomography (CT) images in clinical studies. By utilizing the state of the art deformable image registration, three publicly available datasets were aligned to an age-specific symmetric multimodal human brain template represented in CT and MR. The validation of the cortical parcellation is based on 5 patients with multimodal acquisitions including non-contrast CT, CT angiography and MR T1. By complementing the multimodal CT-MR template with probability maps for the territory of Middle cerebral artery and its cortical regions, this dataset may be valuable for development of computer aided detection and navigation systems addressing neurovascular diseases.