Fetal and neonatal neuroimaging

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide detail of the soft tissues of the fetal and neonatal brain that cannot be obtained by any other imaging modality. Conventional T1 and T2 weighted sequences provide anatomic detail of the normally developing brain and can demonstrate lesions, including those associated with preterm birth, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, perinatal arterial stroke, infections, and congenital malformations. Specialized imaging techniques can be used to assess cerebral vasculature (magnetic resonance angiography and venography), cerebral metabolism (magnetic resonance spectroscopy), cerebral perfusion (arterial spin labeling), and function (functional MRI). A wealth of quantitative tools, most of which were originally developed for the adult brain, can be applied to study the developing brain in utero and postnatally including measures of tissue microstructure obtained from diffusion MRI, morphometric studies to measure whole brain and regional tissue volumes, and automated approaches to study cortical folding. In this chapter, we aim to describe different imaging approaches for the fetal and neonatal brain, and to discuss their use in a range of clinical applications.