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4D Infant Cortical Surface Atlas Construction using Spherical Patch-based Sparse Representation
Zhengwang Wu1, Gang Li1, Yu Meng1
1Department of Radiology and BRIC, UNC at Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Insights
This study introduces a novel 4D infant cortical surface atlas covering 6 postnatal years. This advanced atlas improves the accuracy of neuroimaging analysis for early brain development.
Area of Science:
- Neuroimaging
- Developmental Neuroscience
- Medical Image Analysis
Background:
- Accurate analysis of early brain development is crucial for understanding neurological disorders.
- Existing infant brain atlases lack the temporal resolution needed for detailed longitudinal studies.
- A comprehensive 4D infant cortical surface atlas is essential for advanced neuroimaging research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To construct the first 4D infant cortical surface atlas spanning 6 postnatal years with 11 time points.
- To enhance the accuracy and detail preservation in infant brain atlases.
- To provide a robust tool for longitudinal neuroimaging analysis of infant brain development.
Main Methods:
- Utilized 339 longitudinal MRI scans from 50 healthy infants.
- Employed a two-stage groupwise surface registration strategy for longitudinal consistency.
- Developed a novel spherical patch-based sparse representation to mitigate registration errors.
Main Results:
- Created a 4D infant cortical surface atlas covering 1 to 72 months.
- The proposed method preserves finer details of cortical folding patterns compared to conventional atlases.
- Demonstrated boosted accuracy in registering new infant cortical surfaces.
Conclusions:
- The developed 4D infant cortical surface atlas offers a significant advancement for studying early brain development.
- The novel sparse representation technique enhances atlas fidelity and registration performance.
- This atlas serves as a valuable resource for pediatric neuroimaging research and clinical applications.
Abstract:
The 4D infant cortical surface atlas with densely sampled time points is highly needed for neuroimaging analysis of early brain development. In this paper, we build the 4D infant cortical surface atlas firstly covering 6 postnatal years with 11 time points (i.e., 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, 60, and 72 months), based on 339 longitudinal MRI scans from 50 healthy infants. To build the 4D cortical surface atlas, first, we adopt a two-stage groupwise surface registration strategy to ensure both longitudinal consistency and unbiasedness. Second, instead of simply averaging over the co-registered surfaces, a spherical patch-based sparse representation is developed to overcome possible surface registration errors across different subjects. The central idea is that, for each local spherical patch in the atlas space, we build a dictionary, which includes the samples of current local patches and their spatially-neighboring patches of all co-registered surfaces, and then the current local patch in the atlas is sparsely represented using the built dictionary. Compared to the atlas built with the conventional methods, the 4D infant cortical surface atlas constructed by our method preserves more details of cortical folding patterns, thus leading to boosted accuracy in registration of new infant cortical surfaces.
