Figure 1. Block diagram and intermediate results of the methods.

The preparation of the 11 animals (6 WT, 5 CBP) is followed by the acquisition of magnetic resonance images (Panel (a)). The common image preprocessing stage is composed by format conversion, reorientation (Panel (b)), and brain segmentation, which produces an extracted brain image (Panel (c)). At this point, the procedure splits into two image processing algorithms. Brain tissues volumetry further segments the previously extracted brain into three substances (grey matter, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid, Panels (d–f)) and obtains their volumes for all the subjects. On the other hand, brain regions volumetry implies a combination of normalizations to fit the atlas to each of the brain images in order to get the regional volumes of the subjects (Panel (g)). Progressive overlappings (1–3) of segmented regions over brain axial slices from selected CBP (Panel (g), left column) and WT (Panel (g), right column) subjects are shown. All the resulting volumes were compared by means of t-tests.