PROBABILISTIC ATLASES
Due to pronounced anatomic variability between individual human brains, any atlas or clinical diagnostic system based on a single subject's anatomy cannot succeed fully. Probabilistic atlasing is a research strategy whose goal is to generate anatomical templates that retain quantitative information on inter-subject variations in brain architecture. A digital probabilistic atlas of the human brain, incorporating precise statistical information on positional variability of important functional and anatomic interfaces, may rectify many current atlasing problems, since it specifically stores information on the population variability.
Methods to create probabilistic brain representations currently fall into three major categories, each differing slightly in its conceptual foundations. The three methods are:
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