[MINC-users] BEaST - spatial, intensity normalizations

[Eve M LoCastro]

Dear BEaST-masters,

I am a newcomer to the MINC toolkit, but I have recently begun testing BEaST for skull-stripping in our pipeline and thoroughly enjoying the results. Thank you for this great tool.

I have two questions regarding tweaking and modifying the normalization to MNI space, and the intensity normalization that is applied to the image.

1. With some aged and atrophic brains, sometimes the transformation to MNI is a little bit off when using beast_normalize. Are there any tweaks-to-parameters that I could employ in these subjects to improve the matching to the template. (current command usage: beast_normalize head.mnc head_mni.mnc anat2mni.xfm -modeldir $MincLibPATH)

2. If I am still unsatisfied with the spatial normalization results from the MINC toolkit,  can I use a transformed MNI image from an alternate program (ie FSL, SPM)? If so, what kind of intensity normalization do you suggest I apply to best match the smoothed intensity of images in the included libraries?


Much thanks,

Eve


Eve M. LoCastro
Staff Associate in Radiology
Imaging Data Evaluation and Analytics Lab (IDEAL)
Weill Cornell Medical College
515 E. 71st St S118
Tel: 212-746-1289
Fax: 212-746-4189
http://ideal-cornell.com/<http://ideal-cornell.com>