Cortical Thickness Mapping of the Skull

A short film by Dr Graham Treece http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~gmt11/
This is a computer generated image from a clinical medical CT scan of the head. Generating such an image involves in-house software implementing technology spanning many years of research. Both skin and bone surfaces are extracted from the data using a technique designed specifically for high quality medical visualisation. The outer skin surface is displayed transparent and the skull surface is coloured with a new and very precise measure of the thickness of the outer bone layer.

On this image, pink regions are less than half a millimetre thick, dark blue are over 4 mm thick.

This provides clinicians and those investigating anatomy with a new way of looking at the cortex, that is, the outer layer of bone. In this example such a map highlights remarkable symmetry in the skull, except just over the orbit at the location of a previous injury. These techniques are also being applied in other areas, for instance to try to understand more about the relationship between fracture and the morphology of the hip and the spine.