Weakly Supervised Cerebellar Cortical Surface Parcellation with Self-Visual Representation Learning

Abstract

The cerebellum (i.e., little brain) plays an important role in motion and balances control abilities, despite its much smaller size and deeper sulci compared to the cerebrum. Previous cerebellum studies mainly relied on and focused on conventional volumetric analysis, which ignores the extremely deep and highly convoluted nature of the cerebellar cortex. To better reveal localized functional and structural changes, we propose cortical surface-based analysis of the cerebellar cortex. Specifically, we first reconstruct the cerebellar cortical surfaces to represent and characterize the highly folded cerebellar cortex in a geometrically accurate and topologically correct manner. Then, we propose a novel method to automatically parcellate the cerebellar cortical surface into anatomically meaningful regions by a weakly supervised graph convolutional neural network. Instead of relying on registration or requiring mapping the cerebellar surface to a sphere, which are either inaccurate or have large geometric distortions due to the deep cerebellar sulci, our learning-based model directly deals with the original cerebellar cortical surface by decomposing this challenging task into two steps. First, we learn the effective representation of the cerebellar cortical surface patches with a contrastive self-learning framework. Then, we map the learned representations to parcellation labels. We have validated our method using data from the Baby Connectome Project and the experimental results demonstrate its superior effectiveness and accuracy, compared to existing methods.