Fast and uncertainty-aware cerebral cortex morphometry estimation using random forest regression

Yannick Suter, Christian Rummel, Roland Wiest, Mauricio Reyes

Abstract: The cortical thickness and curvature of the human brain have proven to be valuable markers to detect and monitor neurodegenerative diseases [1]. Since the computational burden of currently available tools for brain morphometry is very high, this analysis often is only used for retrospective studies and not routinely in the clinics. A first attempt at a clinical use of cortical morphology is reported in [2]. We present an experiment for fast morphometry estimations using Random Forest (RF) regression [3] directly from MR imaging data. An uncertainty-aware voxel-wise, parcellation-wise, and multioutput model was built to estimate the thickness and mean curvature of the human cerebral cortex in 15 minutes instead of many hours for mesh-based tools. Preliminary results on a healthy controls database with 315 subjects show a substantial bias for the voxel-wise prediction, but high scan-rescan robustness, the proposed multi-output-parcellation prediction demonstrates the feasibility of the approach.