Automatic Detection of Plis De Passage in the Superior Temporal Sulcus using Surface Profiling and Ensemble SVM

Abstract

Cortical folding, an essential characteristic of the brain cortex, shows variability across individuals. Plis de passages (PPs), namely annectant gyri buried inside the fold, can explain part of the variability. However, a systematic method of automatically detecting all PPs is still not available. In this paper, we present a method to detect the PPs on the cortex automatically. We first extract the geometry information of the localized areas on the cortex via surface profiling. Then, an ensemble support vector machine (SVM) is developed to identify the PPs. Experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of our method.