Extended talairach landmarks on neuroimages for atlas registration

The accuracy of scan-to-atlas registration highly depends on the number of landmarks and the precision of landmark identification. An extended landmark, cerebellum inferior (CBI), is introduced in this paper. The extracted brain and midsagittal plane are applied to identify the modified Talairach landmarks and the new introduced landmark CBI. The AC-PC plane is firstly determined and then anatomical information is applied to estimate the other landmarks. The proposed method is fully automatic and has been validated on 49 FDG-PET normal and pathological scans qualitatively, and 15 cases quantitatively. The average processing time is about 3 seconds on a standard personal computer.