Abstract : The task of classifying or labeling cortical sulci is made difficult by the fact that individual sulci may not have unique distinguishing features and usually need to be identified by a multivariate feature set that takes the relative spatial arrangement into account. In this paper, classical multidimensional scaling (MDS), which gives a geometric interpretation to input dissimilarity data, is used to classify 180 sulci drawn from the ten major classes of sulci. Using a leave-one-out validation strategy, we acheive a success rate of 100% in the best case and 78% in the worst case. For these more difficult cases, we propose a second stage of classification using shape based features. One of these features is the geodesic distance between sulcal curves obtained from a new open curve representation in a geometric framework. With MDS, we offer a simple and intuitive approach to a challenging problem. Not only can we easily separate left and right brain sulci, but we also narrow the classification problem from, in this case, a 10-class to a 2-class problem. More generally, we can identify a region-of-interest (ROI) within which one can carry out further classification.
