SurfNet: Reconstruction of Cortical Surfaces via Coupled Diffeomorphic Deformations

To achieve fast and accurate cortical surface reconstruction from brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs), we develop a method to jointly reconstruct the inner (white-gray matter interface), outer (pial), and midthickness surfaces, regularized by their interdependence. Rather than reconstructing these surfaces separately without taking into consideration their interdependence as in most existing methods, our method learns three diffeomorphic deformations jointly to optimize the midthickness surface to lie halfway between the inner and outer cortical surfaces and simultaneously deforms it inward and outward towards the inner and outer cortical surfaces, respectively. The surfaces are encouraged to have a spherical topology by regularization terms for non-negativeness of the cortical thickness and symmetric cycle-consistency of the coupled surface deformations. The coupled reconstruction of cortical surfaces also facilitates an accurate estimation of the cortical thickness based on the diffeomorphic deformation trajectory of each vertex on the surfaces. Validation experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves state-of-the-art cortical surface reconstruction performance in terms of accuracy and surface topological correctness on large-scale MRI datasets, including ADNI, HCP, and OASIS. The code is available at: https://github.com/MLDataAnalytics/SurfNet.