Abstract
Brain extraction (a.k.a. skull stripping) is a fundamental step in the neuroimaging pipeline as it can affect the accuracy of downstream preprocess such as image registration, tissue classification, etc. Most brain extraction tools have been mainly orientated for human data and are often challenging for non-human primates (NHP). In recent attempts to improve the performance in NHP, deep learning models appear to outperform the traditional tools. However, given the minimal sample size of most NHP studies and notable variations in data quality, the deep learning models are very rarely applied in multi-site samples in NHP imaging. To overcome this challenge, we propose to use transfer-learning framework that leverages a large human imaging dataset to pretrain a convolutional neural network (i.e. U-Net Model), and then transferred to NHP data using a small NHP training sample. The resulting transfer-learning model converged faster and achieved more accurate performance than a similar U-Net Model trained exclusively on NHP samples. We improved the generalizability of the model by upgrading the transfer-learned model using additional training datasets from multiple research sites in the Primate Data-Exchange (PRIME-DE) consortium. Our final model outperformed brain extraction routines from popular MRI packages (AFNI, FSL, and FreeSurfer) across multiple heterogeneous multiple sites from PRIME-DE with less computational cost (20s~10min). Our model, code, and the skull-stripped mask repository of 136 macaque monkeys are publicly available for unrestricted use by the neuroimaging community at https://github.com/HumanBrainED/NHP-BrainExtraction.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.