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Updated: Jul 10, 2026
Making MR Imaging Child's Play - Pediatric Neuroimaging Protocol, Guidelines and Procedure
Published on: July 30, 2009
Segmentation of brain MRI in young children
Maria Murgasova1, Leigh Dyet, David Edwards
1Visual Information Processing Group, Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK. maria.murgasova@imperial.ac.uk
Rationale And Objectives:
This article deals with an automatic tissue segmentation of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in young children.
Materials And Methods:
We examine the suitability of state-of-the-art methods developed for the adult brain when applied to the segmentation of the brain MRI in young children. We develop a method of creation of a population-specific atlas in young children using a single manual segmentation. The method is based on nonlinear propagation of the segmentation into population and subsequent affine alignment into a reference space and averaging.
Results:
Using this approach, we significantly improve the performance of the popular expectation-maximization algorithm on brain MRI in young children. The method can be used for building probabilistic atlases with any number of structures. We compare resulting algorithm with nonrigid registration-based label propagation.
Conclusions:
Finally, both methods are used to measure the volume of seven brain structures and measure the growth between 1 and 2 years of age.
