Surface-based method to evaluate global brain shape asymmetries in human and chimpanzee brains

In this paper we use humans and chimpanzees brain MRI databases to develop methods for evaluating global brain asymmetries. We perform brain segmentation and hemispheric surface extraction on both populations. The human brain segmentation pipeline is adapted to chimpanzees in order to obtain results of good quality. To alleviate the problems due to cortical variability we propose a mesh processing algorithm to compute the brain global shape. Surface-based global brain asymmetries are computed on chimpanzee and human subjects using individual mid-sagittal plane evaluation and population-level mean shape estimation. Asymmetry results are presented in terms of axis-wise components in order to perform more specific evaluation and comparison between the two populations.