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Updated: Jun 2, 2026
State of the Art Cranial Ultrasound Imaging in Neonates
Published on: February 2, 2015
Infant brain atlases from neonates to 1- and 2-year-olds
Feng Shi1, Pew-Thian Yap, Guorong Wu
1IDEA Lab, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America.
Insights
This study introduces novel infant brain atlases for ages 0-2, addressing image contrast issues in neonatal MRI. These atlases improve infant brain studies and are publicly available.
Area of Science:
- Neuroimaging
- Developmental Neuroscience
- Medical Image Analysis
Background:
- Infant MRI studies face challenges due to poor image contrast, particularly in neonates.
- Existing infant atlases are insufficient for comprehensive applications like spatial normalization and segmentation.
- Dramatic early brain development and processing difficulties hinder the creation of infant-specific atlases.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a comprehensive infant brain atlas covering neonatal, 1-year-old, and 2-year-old stages.
- To provide essential tools for structural and functional infant brain research.
- To overcome limitations of current infant neuroimaging analysis methods.
Main Methods:
- Collected a longitudinal dataset of 95 infants scanned at three key ages (neonate, 1, 2 years).
- Utilized advanced MRI segmentation and registration techniques to create age-specific templates, tissue probability maps (TPMs), and brain parcellation maps.
- Established longitudinal correspondences between the developed atlases.
Main Results:
- Successfully constructed infant brain atlases (templates, TPMs, parcellation maps) for neonate, 1-year-old, and 2-year-old groups.
- Demonstrated superior performance of the proposed atlases compared to existing ones in typical infant neuroimaging applications.
- Validated the utility of the atlases for infant-related studies.
Conclusions:
- The developed infant 0-1-2 brain atlases are expected to significantly advance structural and functional infant brain research.
- These atlases provide crucial resources for analyzing early brain development.
- The infant brain atlases are made publicly accessible to the research community.
Background:
Studies for infants are usually hindered by the insufficient image contrast, especially for neonates. Prior knowledge, in the form of atlas, can provide additional guidance for the data processing such as spatial normalization, label propagation, and tissue segmentation. Although it is highly desired, there is currently no such infant atlas which caters for all these applications. The reason may be largely due to the dramatic early brain development, image processing difficulties, and the need of a large sample size.
Methodology:
To this end, after several years of subject recruitment and data acquisition, we have collected a unique longitudinal dataset, involving 95 normal infants (56 males and 39 females) with MRI scanned at 3 ages, i.e., neonate, 1-year-old, and 2-year-old. State-of-the-art MR image segmentation and registration techniques were employed, to construct which include the templates (grayscale average images), tissue probability maps (TPMs), and brain parcellation maps (i.e., meaningful anatomical regions of interest) for each age group. In addition, the longitudinal correspondences between age-specific atlases were also obtained. Experiments of typical infant applications validated that the proposed atlas outperformed other atlases and is hence very useful for infant-related studies.
Conclusions:
We expect that the proposed infant 0-1-2 brain atlases would be significantly conducive to structural and functional studies of the infant brains. These atlases are publicly available in our website, http://bric.unc.edu/ideagroup/free-softwares/.
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