In the last five years, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has become the most popular and effective surgical technique for the treatment of Parkinsons disease (PD). The Subthalamic Nucleus (STN) is the usual target involved when applying DBS. Unfortunately, the STN is in general not visible in common medical imaging modalities. Therefore, atlas-based segmentation is commonly considered to locate it in the images. In this paper, we propose a scheme that allows both, to perform a comparison between different registration algorithms and to evaluate their ability to locate the STN automatically. Using this scheme we can evaluate the expert variability against the error of the algorithms and we demonstrate that automatic STN location is possible and as accurate as the methods currently used.
Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Takuya Morishita, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Elena Beanato, Esra Neufeld, Fabienne Windel, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Traian Popa, Julie Duqué
David Atienza Alonso, Alireza Amirshahi, Jonathan Dan, Adriano Bernini, William Cappelletti, Luca Benini, Una Pale