Analysis of Scalar Maps for the Segmentation of the Corpus Callosum in Diffusion Tensor Fields

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a powerful technique for imaging axonal anatomy in vivo and its automatic segmentation is important for quantitative analysis and visualization. Application of the watershed transform is a recent approach for robustly segmenting diffusion tensor images. Since an important step of the watershed-based segmentation is the gradient computation, this paper investigates scalar maps from DTI and their ability to enhance borders and, therefore, their usefulness in gradient calculation. A comparison between existing scalar maps is conducted in the context of segmentation. New diffusion scalar maps, inspired by mathematical morphology concepts are proposed and included in the comparison. The watershed transform is then applied to segment the corpus callosum, based on the computed scalar maps.