In order to study cortical properties in human, it is necessary to obtain an accurate and explicit representation of the cortical surface in individual subjects. Among many approaches, surface-based method that reconstructs a 3-D model from contour lines on cross-section images is widely used. In general, however, medical brain imaging has some problems such as the complexity of the images, non-linear gain artifacts and so on. Due these limitations, therefore, extracting anatomical structures from imaging data is very a complicated and time-consuming task. In this paper, we present an improved method for extracting contour lines of cortical surface from magnetic resonance images that simplifies procedures of a conventional method. The conventional method obtains contour lines through thinning and chain code process. On the other hand, the proposed method can extract contour lines from comparison between boundary data and labeling image without supplementary processes. The usefulness of the proposed method has been verified using brain image.