Estimating rodent brain volume by a deformable contour model

Cerebral stroke is a cerebrovascular disease caused by an al-teration of blood flow to the brain. Rodents are used to experiment with drugs provoking a stroke and studying the effects of different drugs as a measure of the relation of lesion volume to brain volume. Nowadays, clin-icians are performing these experiments manually, leading to interhuman errors and not repeatability, of results, as well as being time-consuming tasks. This paper presents a methodology to automate this task, per-forming an automatic computation of the brain volume from the brain area for each slice of the rodent brain. Although in its initial state, re-sults are very promising, and so work will follow in this way with the computation of lesion volume.

keywords: Brain volume, contour model, image segmentation