Mindboggle: Automated brain labeling with multiple atlases

Each brain image voxel of each of 20 human subjects is assigned a label by each of the remaining 19 atlases using Mindboggle. The most common label is selected and is given a confidence rating based on the number of atlases that assigned that label. The automatically assigned labels for each subject brain are compared with the manual labels for that subject (its atlas). Unlike recent approaches that transform subject data to a labeled, probabilistic atlas space (constructed from a database of atlases), Mindboggle labels a subject by each atlas in a database independently.When Mindboggle labels a human subject's brain image with at least four atlases, the resulting label agreement with coregistered manual labels is significantly higher than when only a single atlas is used. Different numbers of atlases provide significantly higher label agreements for individual brain regions.Increasing the number of reference brains used to automatically label a human subject brain improves labeling accuracy with respect to manually assigned labels. Mindboggle software can provide confidence measures for labels based on probabilistic assignment of labels and could be applied to large databases of brain images.When comparing structures or functions across brains, it is common to label the gross anatomy of brain image data and to compare the structures or functions that lie within anatomically labeled regions. Since brains differ in their anatomy [1-10], it would seem reasonable to refer to the anatomy of many brains when labeling an individual subject's brain image. Atlases are manually labeled brains used as references. Using every atlas from a group of atlases independent of each other was found to give labeling results superior to those obtained by selecting the closest matching single atlas from the group, the average atlas, or an individual atlas, for the case of confocal microscopy images of bee brains [11]. However, labeling a subject's brain image with many different brains p