Reliable manual segmentation of the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes on magnetic resonance images of healthy subjects

Background: It is a challenge to reliably measure the lobar volumes from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data.

Objective: Description of a landmark-based method for volumetric segmentation of the brain into the four cerebral lobes from MR images.

Method: The segmentation method relies on a combination of anatomical landmarks and geometrical definitions. The first step, described previously, is a segmentation of the four lobes on the surface of the brain. The internal borders between the lobes are defined on the axial slices of the brain. The intra- and inter- rater reliability was determined from the MRI scans of a group of 10 healthy control subjects measured by 2 independent raters.

Results: The intra-rater relative error (and intra-class correlation coefficient) of the lobar volume measures ranged from 0.81% to 3.85% (from 0.97 to 0.99). The inter-rater relative error (and intra-class correlation coefficient) ranged from 0.55% to 3.09% (from 0.94 to 0.99).

Conclusion: This technique has been shown to have high intra- and inter-rater reliability. The current method provides a method to obtain volumetric estimates of the 4 cerebral lobes.