Visualization of human brain function based on cortical activity is an interesting research work. Since most of the cerebral cortical surface areas are buried inside folds, the complex topology of cortical surface makes the visualization extremely difficult. In this paper, we present a new visualization system involving reconstructing 3D cortical surfaces, rendering and flattening the resulting surface. Besides developing the conventional polygon-based flattening algorithm, we also propose a new voxel-based flattening method that flattens the cortical surface directly for the 3D voxel data. For a polygon-based method, the cerebral cortical surfaces have to be firstly transferred to 3D polygons and then mapped onto a minimally distorted 2D plane. Which is achieved by an optimization procedure. However, the posed new method converts the 3D cortical voxel data directly to a 2D map. The flattened map is then obtained from warping this 2D map to the position of minimum distortions. We demonstrate the utility of two approaches by the entirely and partially flattened cerebral cortex map in MRI images. These approaches will facilitate more refined analysis in the function of cerebral cortex.
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