Sparse description of the cortical surface pediatric development: A sulcal pits study

Despite the large variability of sulcal folds, their deepest points, namely the sulcal pits, provide a sparse and reproducible description of the cortical surface. Their role during the antenatal and pediatric development of the brain remains unclear. This work is the first study of the evolution of all sulcal pits during healthy pediatric development. We propose a new method to identify sulcal pits across subjects that benefits from the input of sulcal basins using a varifold metric. We then present a procedure to extract the amplitude and principal direction of sulcal pits trajectories.