A normative spatiotemporal MRI atlas of the fetal brain for automatic segmentation and analysis of early brain growth

Ali Gholipour,Judy A Estroff,Onur Afacan,Caitlin K Rollins,Catherine Limperopoulos,Abdelhakim Ouaalam,Clemente Velasco-Annis,Edward Yang,Sean Clancy,Alireza Akhondi-Asl,Simon K Warfield,Cynthia M Ortinau

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-00525-w

Abstract

Longitudinal characterization of early brain growth in-utero has been limited by a number of challenges in fetal imaging, the rapid change in size, shape and volume of the developing brain, and the consequent lack of suitable algorithms for fetal brain image analysis. There is a need for an improved digital brain atlas of the spatiotemporal maturation of the fetal brain extending over the key developmental periods. We have developed an algorithm for construction of an unbiased four-dimensional atlas of the developing fetal brain by integrating symmetric diffeomorphic deformable registration in space with kernel regression in age. We applied this new algorithm to construct a spatiotemporal atlas from MRI of 81 normal fetuses scanned between 19 and 39 weeks of gestation and labeled the structures of the developing brain. We evaluated the use of this atlas and additional individual fetal brain MRI atlases for completely automatic multi-atlas segmentation of fetal brain MRI. The atlas is available online as a reference for anatomy and for registration and segmentation, to aid in connectivity analysis, and for groupwise and longitudinal analysis of early brain growth.

Highlights

Stages of human brain development are important as any abnormality in development may result in long-term neurodevelopmental impairment and may even affect the survival in the perinatal period and later in childhood[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
Key early brain development occurs before the age at which prematurely born infants are viable, and the factors which lead to premature birth may alter brain anatomy in a number of ways, including by direct injury such as stroke, and by delayed maturation
The fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans were pre-processed by the steps discussed in the Methods Section

Summary

Introduction

Stages of human brain development are important as any abnormality in development may result in long-term neurodevelopmental impairment and may even affect the survival in the perinatal period and later in childhood[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. The construction of digital spatiotemporal MRI atlases of early brain development is relatively new: Kuklisova-Murgasova et al.[49] developed a 4D probabilistic atlas of early brain growth from in-vivo MRI of 142 preterm infants in the 29 to 44 weeks post-menstrual age. They used pairwise affine registration of anatomy with kernel regression in age for atlas construction. For a review of developmental brain atlases we refer to Gui et al.[56]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion