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Using Control Points to Fix Intensity Normalization

Sometimes the intensity normalization step will fail because it cannot determine the proper intensity for white matter. The result is an erroneous white matter segmentation. A control point is a manually selected location in the volume that the user feels sure is inside the white matter boundary, and subsequently should be normalized to an intensity of 110. TkMedit displays the intensity of any voxel your cursor is on as a "value" in the Cursor and Mouse sections of its Tools interface.

Manually Selecting Control Points

Subject 4 is an example of a subject that needs some control points in order to ensure that the voxels are normalized correctly and then included in the wm.mgz volume. This page will walk you through setting control points to fix this type of problem.

First, make sure you have subject4_before loaded into tkmedit:

tkmedit subject4_before brainmask.mgz lh.white -aux T1.mgz -aux-surface rh.white

Scroll through this subject and find the location where the white matter is being excluded from the surface. In subject 4 this happens around coronal slice 149.

attachment:subject4_beforeCPs.jpg

To add control points you will first need to select the Edit Control Points tool attachment:icon_control_points.gif. Middle-mouse-button clicking will create a control point; right-button clicking will delete a control point. As you select control points, they will appear as small green crosshairs. Select a few control points around your trouble areas, space them out throughout the brain and on different slices. You want to pick points in a region where the wm intensity is lower than it should be (that is, having a voxel value less than 110).

General tips for adding control points:

Here is an example of one slice with the control points added. Note that there are other control points spread out through other slices as well.

attachment:ctrlpoints.jpg

After adding the control points, go to File -> Save Control Points; this will create a file called <subject name>/tmp/control.dat. Using the added control points the subject should now look like this:

attachment:subject4_afterCPs.jpg

Once your control points are saved you can rerun recon-all as follows:

recon-all -autorecon2-cp -autorecon3 -subjid subject4_before

This step will take a long time so there is no need to run it for the purposes of this tutorial.