Using a Linear Diagnostic Function and Non-rigid Registration to Search for Morphological Differences Between Populations: An Example Involving the Male and Female Corpus Callosum

Supplied with image data from two distinct populations we apply a non-rigid registration technique to place each image into correspondence with an atlas. Having found the appropriate transformations we then use the use determinant of the Jacobian of the corresponding transformations and find the linear discriminant function which can best distinguish between the populations on the basis of this data. We apply the method to a collection of mid-sagittal slices of the corpus callosum for a group of 34 males and 52 females. We find that there appear to be no statistically significant differences between the relative sizes of regions in the corpus callosum between males and females.