A Collaborative Software Tool for the Evaluation of MRI Brain Segmentation Methods
Résumé
The paper presents two web services (AuroraWeb and AuroraWiki) for collaborative work on brain tissue seg-mentation and software tools related to MRI recordings. The web services allow members to share data and results by uploading and downloading, compare methods through a comprehensive segmentation evaluation framework, and provide overview and documentation of segmentation algorithms and their parameters. Presently the web services are applied to both simulated brain images (where a " ground truth " is available), and dual volume 3D brain images from a larger interdisciplinary study of cognitive aging. Commonly used brain segmenters that are tested include SPM2/SPM5, FSL and FreeSurfer, in addition to locally developed methods. New uploaded methods could either be as C/C++ source code, where a user template is provided, or as executables. We believe this technology can improve quality and dissemination of tools for quantitative MRI of the brain.