A high-resolution MRI study of linear growth of the human fetal skull base

The skull base, otherwise referred to as the basicranium or cranial base, plays a key role in the process of skull development, providing both support for the brain and an architectural component of the craniofacial complex. Consequently, the fetal skull base has been the focus of numerous studies employing various methods, including sectioning, plain radiography and CT. This paper investigates high-resolution (hr) MRI as an alternative method for looking at and quantifying the fetal skull base. The evaluation tests two basic hypotheses drawn from previous studies. These suggest that the anterior segment of the midline skull base grows more rapidly than the posterior segment and that the width of the posterior cranial fossa increases disproportionately in relation to its length. I imaged 42 formalin preserved human fetuses from museum collections with hrMRI. The T2-weighted image voxels were significantly smaller than those acquired with conventional clinical MRI. Landmarks of the fetal skull base were identified on reformatted axial and sagittal images. Bivariate plots revealed that the growth rate of the anterior skull base is almost twice that of the posterior skull base and that increases in the width of the posterior cranial fossa exceed those in its length. These findings confirm those of previous investigations and show that hrMRI offers a way forward in noninvasive quantification of fetal morphology.