A dynamic brain atlas

We describe a dynamic atlas that can be customized to an individual study subject in near-real-time. The atlas comprises 180 brain volumes each of which has been automatically segmented into grey matter, white matter and CSF, and also non-rigidly registered to the Montreal BrainWeb reference dataset providing automatic delineation of brain structures of interest. To create a dynamic atlas, the user loads a study dataset (eg: a patient) and queries the atlas database to identify similar subjects. All selected database subjects are then aligned with the study subject using affine registration, and average tissue probability maps and structure delineations produced. The system can run on distributed data and distributed CPUs illustrating the potential of computational grids in medical image analysis.