Using a deformable surface model to obtain a shape representation of the cortex

The problem of obtaining a mathematical representation of the cortex of the human brain is examined. A parametrization of the outer cortex is first obtained using a deformable surface algorithm which, motivated by the structure of the cortex, is constructed to find the central layer of thick surfaces. Based on this parametrization a hierarchical representation of the cortical structure is proposed through its depth map and its curvature maps at various scales. Various experiments on magnetic resonance data are presented