An automatic and accurate deep learning-based neuroimaging pipeline for the neonatal brain

Accurate segmentation of neonatal brain tissues and structures is crucial for studying normal development and diagnosing early neurodevelopmental disorders. However, there is a lack of an end-to-end pipeline for automated segmentation and imaging analysis of the normal and abnormal neonatal brain.

To develop and validate a deep learning-based pipeline for neonatal brain segmentation and analysis of structural magnetic resonance images (MRI).

Two cohorts were enrolled in the study, including cohort 1 (582 neonates from the developing Human Connectome Project) and cohort 2 (37 neonates imaged using a 3.0-tesla MRI scanner in our hospital).We developed a deep leaning-based architecture capable of brain segmentation into 9 tissues and 87 structures. Then, extensive validations were performed for accuracy, effectiveness, robustness and generality of the pipeline. Furthermore, regional volume and cortical surface estimation were measured through in-house bash script implemented in FSL (Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain Software Library) to ensure reliability of the pipeline. Dice similarity score (DSC), the 95th percentile Hausdorff distance (H95) and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were calculated to assess the quality of our pipeline. Finally, we finetuned and validated our pipeline on 2-dimensional thick-slice MRI in cohorts 1 and 2.

The deep learning-based model showed excellent performance for neonatal brain tissue and structural segmentation, with the best DSC and the 95th percentile Hausdorff distance (H₉₅) of 0.96 and 0.99 mm, respectively. In terms of regional volume and cortical surface analysis, our model showed good agreement with ground truth. The ICC values for the regional volume were all above 0.80. Considering the thick-slice image pipeline, the same trend was observed for brain segmentation and analysis. The best DSC and H₉₅ were 0.92 and 3.00 mm, respectively. The regional volumes and surface curvature had ICC values just below 0.80.

We propose an automatic, accurate, stable and reliable pipeline for neonatal brain segmentation and analysis from thin and thick structural MRI. The external validation showed very good reproducibility of the pipeline.