pBrain: A novel pipeline for Parkinson related brain structure segmentation

Abstract

[EN] Parkinson is a very prevalent neurodegenerative disease impacting the life of millions of people worldwide. Although its cause remains unknown, its functional and structural analysis is fundamental to advance in the search of a cure or symptomatic treatment. The automatic segmentation of deep brain structures related to Parkinson's disease could be beneficial for the follow up and treatment planning. Unfortunately, there is not broadly available segmentation software to automatically measure Parkinson related structures. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline to segment three deep brain structures related to Parkinson's disease (substantia nigra, subthalamic nucleus and red nucleus). The proposed method is based on the multi-atlas label fusion technology that works on standard and high-resolution T2-weighted images. The proposed method also includes as post-processing a new neural network-based error correction step to minimize systematic segmentation errors. The proposed method has been compared to other state-of-the-art methods showing competitive results in terms of accuracy and execution time.