Implementation of the Functional Shape Cortical Brain Surface Analysis Pipeline on a High Performance Computing Environment

The main organ of the human central nervous system, the human brain, is one of the most complex organs in the human body. The causes of many brain diseases and disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, and their ideal treatments are still not fully understood with the current medical technology. With medical imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalography (EEG), the data obtained from these techniques can be used to study and examine brain diseases and disorders. This project focuses on utilizing a surface registration method on multiple brain surfaces to obtain various geometric transformations for brain studies, and the implementation of the analysis pipeline on a high performance computing (HPC) environment. Due to the infeasibility on runtime for performing surface registration between one template brain surface and multiple target brain surfaces, an approach to perform sub-surface extraction on each brain surface and computation on a HPC environment has been employed. This has allowed a significant reduction in runtime and has also allowed the results to be obtained within reasonable time.