Measuring Cortical Thickness in Brain MRI Volumes to Detect Focal Cortical Dysplasia

Ljiljana Platisa¹, Anthony De Smet¹, Ivana Despotovic¹, Asli Kumcu¹, Karel Deblaere², Aleksandra Pizurica¹, Ewout Vansteenkiste¹, Wilfried Philips¹

We propose a new algorithm for cortical thickness measurement in T1 weighted (T1-w) MRI images aiming to overcome the major limitation of a number of the existing similar methods which could lead to under- or over-estimated thickness of grey matter within sulci: (1) lack of awareness of the partial volume (PV) effect (the presence of multiple tissue classes in a single voxel) present at both the white matter (WM) to gray matter (GM) and the GM to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) transition, and (2) ignorance of the regions of buried cortex where the CSF between the sulci is not resolved.