VOLBRAIN : Software to analyze MRI brain data. It provides a report including volume information on brain structures

Challenges

Software providing researchers and practitioners with automated quantitative analysis of MRI data outlining It is able to provide expected volume for each considered structures according to age and sex of the subject under study. It could help to detect volumetric abnormality and thus potential pathology.

Innovative solution

VolBrain is a pipeline dedicated to automatically analyze MRI brain data. It works as a black box from the user point of view as it gets an anonymized MRI brain volume in NIFTI format and produces a pdf report with the volumes of the main IntraCranial Cavity (ICC) tissues (i.e., CSF, GM and WM). It also provides volume information of some macroscopic areas such as brain hemispheres, cerebellum and brainstem. Finally, automatic subcortical structure segmentation is performed, and related volumes and label maps are provided.

APPLICATIONS

• Clinical trials

• Companion diagnostics

• Clinical routine

COMPETITIVES ADVANTAGES

• No need of learning complex software packages

• No need having expensive computational infrastructures in your local site

• Faster and more accurate than other solutions

• VolBrain works in a fully automatic manner and is able to provide brain structure volumes without any human interaction

• Two reports (CSV and PDF) providing all the volumetry values calculated from the segmentations as well as asymmetry indexes

DEVELOPMENT STATUS: 

• Volbrain has already been used more than 167 000 times by more than 5 000 users

How it works

Intracranial cavity mask, hemisphere/cerebellum masks and subcortical labels were manually segmented by our expert on a set of T1w MRI. This training library is then used to perform automatic segmentation of your new cases. All structures were outlined according to our expert definition (our Lateral ventricles definition did not include choroid plexuses) with the exception of hippocampus which was segmented following the EADC protocol.

Once the process is finished, you will be notified by e-mail so you will be able to download a package including some image files and two (CSV and PDF) reports providing all the volumetry values calculated from the segmentations. As you can see in the figure below, the PDF includes patient information, the volumes of parenchyma, brain tissues, macrostructures and subcortical structures as well as asymmetry indexes. Finally, it also includes several snapshots from the different labeling steps as a quality control.