Age-specific structural fetal brain atlases construction and cortical development quantification for chinese...

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Developmental Neuroscience
• Medical Image Analysis

Background:

• Structural brain atlases are vital for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of fetal brain development.
• Existing atlases are primarily based on Caucasian populations, limiting their utility for other ethnicities due to neuroanatomical variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop age-specific fetal brain atlases for the Chinese population.
• To enable accurate quantitative analysis of typical and atypical fetal brain development in Chinese infants.
• To investigate neuroanatomical differences between Chinese and Caucasian fetal brains.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an unbiased template construction algorithm on 115 normal fetal brain MRI scans (21-35 weeks gestation).
• Created a 4D spatiotemporal atlas to quantify morphological development patterns (cortical thickness, surface area, sulcal/gyral patterns).
• Validated atlas accuracy by comparing segmentation performance against Caucasian atlases on a Chinese fetal brain dataset.

Main Results:

• Developed a set of age-specific Chinese fetal brain atlases.
• Identified significant anatomical differences between Chinese and Caucasian fetal brains, particularly in medial frontal and temporal regions.
• Demonstrated that Chinese atlases significantly enhance brain tissue segmentation accuracy for Chinese fetal brains compared to Caucasian atlases.

Conclusions:

• Chinese fetal brain atlases are essential for accurate analysis of fetal brain development in the Chinese population.
• These novel atlases facilitate the detection of fetal brain abnormalities.
• The developed atlases and parcellations are publicly available for research.