10 DAILY MICCAI Wednesday Poster Presentation whether it really works –not just on healthy controls, but also on the ability to distinguish between diseases.” The folding of the human brain poses another significant challenge to surmount in accurately measuring cortical thickness. The brain sort of folds in on itself, and from the perspective of MRI, its surfaces virtually touch. From the segmentation, you effectively do not see a difference between the two banks of the sulcus, which present as a thick mass of gray matter. “FreeSurfer does a decent job of resolving these sulci, but often it doesn’t correctly go all the way down into the sulcus, and so you have an incorrect identification of cortical thickness,” Richard explains. “We believe, but have to validate, that our method gives a better resolution of these sulci. If it doesn’t, we have some ideas by going to super-resolution, for example, by leveraging high-field MRI to give us some basis for training our models to resolve these sulci better.” Finally, most other methods give a point estimate of cortical thickness, leaving clinicians unaware of the potential margin of error. Another next step is to produce a distribution of plausible cortical thickness values, or error bars, using ensemble methods, allowing a better understanding of measurement uncertainty and identifying regions of the brain where measurements may be less reliable. At Inselspital, Richard works in a group called the Support Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, a multidisciplinary research group with MDs, physicists, computer scientists, and psychologists interested in interpreting and quantifying imaging of the human brain. Before we finish, he is keen to mention and appreciate the work of his recently graduated PhD student, Michael Rebsamen. “Michael worked together with me on developing DL+DiReCT, which is the foundation of this work, funded by a grant from the Novartis Research Foundation,” he tells us. “Without that foundational work, we wouldn’t have been able to do this.” To learn more about Richard’s work, visit Poster 6 this afternoon at 14:30-16:00 in the Poster Hall. “We believe, but have to validate, that our method gives a better resolution
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