volBrain: An Online MRI Brain Volumetry System

Front Neuroinform. 2016 Jul 27:10:30. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2016.00030. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

The amount of medical image data produced in clinical and research settings is rapidly growing resulting in vast amount of data to analyze. Automatic and reliable quantitative analysis tools, including segmentation, allow to analyze brain development and to understand specific patterns of many neurological diseases. This field has recently experienced many advances with successful techniques based on non-linear warping and label fusion. In this work we present a novel and fully automatic pipeline for volumetric brain analysis based on multi-atlas label fusion technology that is able to provide accurate volumetric information at different levels of detail in a short time. This method is available through the volBrain online web interface (http://volbrain.upv.es), which is publically and freely accessible to the scientific community. Our new framework has been compared with current state-of-the-art methods showing very competitive results.

Keywords: MRI; brain; cloud computing; multi-atlas label fusion; segmentation.