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A spatio-temporal atlas of the developing fetal brain with spina bifida aperta

Fidon, L; Viola, E; Mufti, N; David, AL; Melbourne, A; Demaerel, P; Ourselin, S; ... Aertsen, M; + view all (2021) A spatio-temporal atlas of the developing fetal brain with spina bifida aperta. Open Research Europe , 1 , Article 123. 10.12688/openreseurope.13914.1. Green open access

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Abstract

Background: Spina bifida aperta (SBA) is a birth defect associated with severe anatomical changes in the developing fetal brain. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) atlases are popular tools for studying neuropathology in the brain anatomy, but previous fetal brain MRI atlases have focused on the normal fetal brain. We aimed to develop a spatio-temporal fetal brain MRI atlas for SBA. Methods: We developed a semi-automatic computational method to compute the first spatio-temporal fetal brain MRI atlas for SBA. We used 90 MRIs of fetuses with SBA with gestational ages ranging from 21 to 35 weeks. Isotropic and motion-free 3D reconstructed MRIs were obtained for all the examinations. We propose a protocol for the annotation of anatomical landmarks in brain 3D MRI of fetuses with SBA with the aim of making spatial alignment of abnormal fetal brain MRIs more robust. In addition, we propose a weighted generalized Procrustes method based on the anatomical landmarks for the initialization of the atlas. The proposed weighted generalized Procrustes can handle temporal regularization and missing annotations. After initialization, the atlas is refined iteratively using non-linear image registration based on the image intensity and the anatomical land-marks. A semi-automatic method is used to obtain a parcellation of our fetal brain atlas into eight tissue types: white matter, ventricular system, cerebellum, extra-axial cerebrospinal fluid, cortical gray matter, deep gray matter, brainstem, and corpus callosum. Results: An intra-rater variability analysis suggests that the seven anatomical land-marks are sufficiently reliable. We find that the proposed atlas outperforms a normal fetal brain atlas for the automatic segmentation of brain 3D MRI of fetuses with SBA. Conclusions: We make publicly available a spatio-temporal fetal brain MRI atlas for SBA, available here: https://doi.org/10.7303/syn25887675. This atlas can support future research on automatic segmentation methods for brain 3D MRI of fetuses with SBA.

Type: Article
Title: A spatio-temporal atlas of the developing fetal brain with spina bifida aperta
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.12688/openreseurope.13914.1
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13914.1
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 Fidon L et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL EGA Institute for Womens Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL EGA Institute for Womens Health > Maternal and Fetal Medicine
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Med Phys and Biomedical Eng
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10136792
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