Quantifying and modelling tissue maturation in the living human fetal brain

Abstract

Recent advances in medical imaging are beginning to allow us to quantify brain tissue maturation in the growing human brain prior to normal term age, and are beginning to shed new light on early human brain growth. These advances compliment the work already done in cellular level imaging in animal and post mortem studies of brain development. The opportunities for collaborative research that bridges the gap between macroscopic and microscopic windows on the developing brain are significant. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the current research into MR imaging of the living fetal brain with the aim of motivating improved interfaces between the two fields. The review begins with a description of faster MRI techniques that are capable of freezing motion of the fetal head during the acquisition of a slice, and how these have been combined with advanced post-processing algorithms to build 3D images from motion scattered slices. Such rich data has motivated the development of techniques to automatically label developing tissue zones within MRI data allowing their quantification in 3D and 4D within the normally growing fetal brain. These methods have provided the basis for later work that has created the first maps of tissue growth rate and cortical folding in normally developing brains in-utero. These measurements provide valuable findings that compliment those derived from post-mortem anatomy, and additionally allow for the possibility of larger population studies of the influence of maternal environmental and genes on early brain development.