An automatic pipeline for atlas-based fetal and neonatal brain segmentation and analysis
This addresses the lack of automatic tools for perinatal brain analysis, which is crucial for studying brain growth and complications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing atlas-based methods.
The authors developed an automatic pipeline for segmenting fetal and neonatal brain structures in MRI, using new atlases and registration methods, which achieved accurate results compared to expert annotations and outperformed a reference pipeline for both early and late-onset fetal brains.
The automatic segmentation of perinatal brain structures in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is of utmost importance for the study of brain growth and related complications. While different methods exist for adult and pediatric MRI data, there is a lack for automatic tools for the analysis of perinatal imaging. In this work, a new pipeline for fetal and neonatal segmentation has been developed. We also report the creation of two new fetal atlases, and their use within the pipeline for atlas-based segmentation, based on novel registration methods. The pipeline is also able to extract cortical and pial surfaces and compute features, such as curvature, thickness, sulcal depth, and local gyrification index. Results show that the introduction of the new templates together with our segmentation strategy leads to accurate results when compared to expert annotations, as well as better performances when compared to a reference pipeline (developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP)), for both early and late-onset fetal brains.