Fast and intuitive segmentation of gyri of the human brain

The cortical surface of the human brain consists of a large number of folds forming valleys and ridges, the gyri and sulci. Often, it is desirable to perform a segmentation of a brain image into these underlying structures in order to assess parameters relative to these functional components. Typical examples for this include measurements of cortical thickness for individual functional areas, or the correlation of functional areas derived from fMRI data to corresponding anatomical areas seen in structural imaging. In this paper, we present a novel interactive technique, that allows for fast and intuitive segmentation of these functional areas from T1-weighted MR images of the brain. Our segmentation approach is based exclusively on morphological image processing operations, eliminating the requirement for explicit reconstruction of the brains surface.