Kenichi Oishi1, Pamela Donahue2,
Lynn Anderson3, Steven Buchthal3, Thomas Ernst3,
Andreia Faria1, Hangyi Jiang1,4, Xin Li4,
Michael Miller5, Peter van Zijl1,4, Susumu Mori1,4,
Linda Chang3
1Department of Radiology and
Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore,
MD, United States; 2Department of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine; 3Neuroscience and Magnetic
Resonance Research Program, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University; 4F.M.
Kirby Research Center for Functional Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger
Institute; 5Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins
University
We
have developed neonatal brain atlases with detailed anatomic information
derived from DTI and co-registered anatomical MRI. Combined with a highly
elastic non-linear transformation, we attempted to normalize neonatal brain
images to the atlas space and three-dimensionally parcellate the images into
122 brain structures. The accuracy level of the normalization was measured by
the agreement with manual segmentation. This method was applied to 33 healthy
term infants, ranging from 37 to 53 weeks of age since conception, to
characterize developmental changes. The future applications for this atlas
include investigations of the effect of prenatal events and the determination
of imaging biomarkers.