A common element of virtually all brain mapping techniques is
the registration of functional data on an anatomical model
obtained from structural MRI. A registration approach that we
have explored for cortical stimulation mapping (CSM) of language
areas in the brain is to generate a 3-D rendering of the cortical
surface that approximates as closely as possible a photograph of
the brain surface as seen at surgery, then to manually indicate
the location of CSM sites on the rendering. The primary
requirement for this technique is a highly accurate visualization
of the surface, which in our experience is best obtained from a
straightforward isosurfacing algorithm applied to a cleanly
"skull-stripped" image volume. In this talk I will describe our
approach to visualization-based mapping, including a
constraint-based technique for skull stripping that combines
learned shape knowledge of the cortical envelope with local
interactive control, integration of this technique in a working
system that has been used to map over 40 patients to-date, and
development of a web-based experiment management system for
organizing and visualizing multi-modality language mapping data
in a structural information framework.
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