Abstract
Longitudinal studies measuring changes in cortical morphology over time are best facilitated by parcellation schemes compatible across all life stages. The Melbourne Children’s Regional Infant Brain (M-CRIB) and M-CRIB 2.0 atlases provide voxel-based parcellations of the cerebral cortex compatible with the Desikan-Killiany (DK) and the Desikan-Killiany-Tourville (DKT) cortical labelling schemes. This study introduces surface-based versions of the M-CRIB and M-CRIB 2.0 atlases, termed M-CRIB-S(DK) and M-CRIB-S(DKT), with a pipeline for automated parcellation utilizing FreeSurfer and developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) tools. Using T2-weighted magnetic resonance images of healthy neonates (n = 58), we created average spherical templates of cortical curvature and sulcal depth. Manually labelled regions in a subset (n = 10) were encoded into the spherical template space to construct M-CRIB-S(DK) and M-CRIB-S(DKT) atlases. Labelling accuracy was assessed using Dice overlap and boundary discrepancy measures with leave-one-out cross-validation. Cross-validated labelling accuracy was high for both atlases (average regional Dice = 0.79–0.83). Worst-case boundary discrepancy instances ranged from 9.96–10.22 mm, which appeared to be driven by variability in anatomy for some cases. The M-CRIB-S atlas data and automatic pipeline allow extraction of neonatal cortical surfaces labelled according to the DK or DKT parcellation schemes.
Highlights
Longitudinal studies measuring changes in cortical morphology over time are best facilitated by parcellation schemes compatible across all life stages
Tools tuned for adult brains, such as the adult T1-based templates and atlases provided in FreeSurfer[5,8], are not directly applicable to neonatal brain images
In this study we aimed to provide neonatal average surface templates and surface-based cortical atlases based on the Melbourne Children’s Regional Infant Brain (M-CRIB) and M-CRIB 2.0 parcellation schemes, that are compatible with FreeSurfer and the developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) pipelines[2,5,8]
Summary
Longitudinal studies measuring changes in cortical morphology over time are best facilitated by parcellation schemes compatible across all life stages. The Melbourne Children’s Regional Infant Brain (M-CRIB) and M-CRIB 2.0 atlases provide voxel-based parcellations of the cerebral cortex compatible with the Desikan-Killiany (DK) and the Desikan-Killiany-Tourville (DKT) cortical labelling schemes. The M-CRIB-S atlas data and automatic pipeline allow extraction of neonatal cortical surfaces labelled according to the DK or DKT parcellation schemes. Labelling a neonatal brain image using adult-derived atlases is problematic, due to the inherent difference in anatomy and tissue composition between infant and adult brains[15]. While accurate labelling can be achieved using voxel-based parcellation schemes[16,18,20], surface-based registration methods lead to significantly improved alignment of cortical landmarks, including cortical folds, and more accurate placement of areal boundaries[21,22]
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