Abnormal neonatal brain microstructure in gestational diabetes mellitus revealed by MRI texture analysis

To investigate the value of MRI texture analysis in evaluating the effect of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) on neonatal brain microstructure development, we retrospectively collected images of neonates undergoing head MRI scans, including a GDM group (N1 = 37) and a healthy control group (N2 = 34). MaZda texture analysis software was used to extract the texture features from different sequence images and perform dimensionality reduction, and then the texture features selected by the lowest misjudgement rate method were imported into SPSS software for statistical analysis. In our study, we found that GDM affects the development of the microstructure of the neonatal brain, and different combinations of texture features have different recognition performances, such as different sequences and different brain regions. As a consequence, texture analysis combining multiple conventional MRI sequences has a high recognition performance in revealing the abnormal development of the brain microstructure of neonates born of mothers with GDM.