Question: Can you describe briefly how you are doing whatever you do?

Daniel Mietchen answered on 20 Jun 2010:

What I mostly do is surface-based brain morphometry, which involves roughly the following steps
– take the scans of someone’s head,
– remove imaging artifacts and noise,
– separate the brain from the non-brain tissue (the latter includes the skin, skull and muscles),
– separate the brain tissue into typically three tissue classes: white matter, gray matter, brain fluid
– extract the shape of the boundary between neighbouring classes (e.g. between gray and white matter)
– determine some parameters of interest (e.g. the thickness of the cortical gray matter, or the folding of the brain at a particular location or in total)
– compare these parameters across brains, which involves mapping them into a common coordinate system, such that small and large, long and wide brains can be compared appropriately
– check the results and consider whether they fulfill a number of quality criteria; if not, find out why and redo the critical part.