Patent 7822456 was granted and assigned to Agency for Science, Technology and Research on October, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Volumes of interest may be defined, within a three-dimensional brain image, for each of three orthogonal directions. Measures, which may, for example, be energy or entropy measures, are determined for slices of the volumes of interest in the three directions. The volume of interest corresponding to the sagittal direction is then identified. The slice, among the slices in the volume of interest corresponding to the identified sagittal direction, having the optical measure is used to define a first estimate of the mid-sagittal plane. The first estimate of the mid-sagittal plane may then be used to build an input to an optimization technique, which operates until a convergence criterion is satisfied, at which point a final estimate of the mid-sagittal plane may be produced.