BrainPrint: identifying subjects by their brain

Abstract

Introducing BrainPrint, a compact and discriminative representation of anatomical structures in the brain. BrainPrint captures shape information of an ensemble of cortical and subcortical structures by solving the 2D and 3D Laplace-Beltrami operator on triangular (boundary) and tetrahedral (volumetric) meshes. We derive a robust classifier for this representation that identifies the subject in a new scan, based on a database of brain scans. In an example dataset containing over 3000 MRI scans, we show that BrainPrint captures unique information about the subject's anatomy and permits to correctly classify a scan with an accuracy of over 99.8%. All processing steps for obtaining the compact representation are fully automated making this processing framework particularly attractive for handling large datasets.