A cortical shape-adaptive approach to local gyrification index

Abstract

The amount of cortical folding, or gyrification, is typically measured within local cortical regions covered by an equidistant geodesic or nearest neighborhood-ring kernel. However, without careful design, such a kernel can easily cover multiple sulcal and gyral regions that may not be functionally related. Furthermore, this can result in smoothing out details of cortical folding, which consequently blurs local gyrification measurements. In this paper, we propose a novel kernel shape to locally quantify cortical gyrification within sulcal and gyral regions. We adapt wavefront propagation to generate a spatially varying kernel shape that encodes cortical folding patterns: neighboring gyral crowns, sulcal fundi, and sulcal banks. For this purpose, we perform anisotropic wavefront propagation that runs fast along gyral crowns and sulcal fundi by solving a static Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equation. The resulting kernel adaptively elongates along gyral crowns and sulcal fundi, while keeping a uniform shape over flat regions like sulcal banks. We then measure local gyrification within the proposed spatially varying kernel. The experimental results show that the proposed kernel-based gyrification measure achieves a higher reproducibility than the conventional method in a multi-scan dataset. We further apply the proposed kernel to a brain development study in the early postnatal phase from neonate to 2 years of age. In this study we find that our kernel yields both positive and negative associations of gyrification with age, whereas the conventional method only captures positive associations. In general, our method yields sharper and more detailed statistical maps that associate cortical folding with sex and gestational age.

Keywords: Adaptive kernel; Early brain development study; Local gyrification index; Static Hamilton–Jacobi partial differential equation; Sulcal and gyral curves; Wavefront propagation.