Abstract #2024

Fetal Cortex Extraction Using Subject Specific Priors

Paul Aljabar¹, Mellisa S. Damodaram², Mary A. Rutherford³, Daniel Rueckert¹, Joseph V. Hajnal³

¹Visual Information Processing group, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; ² Division of Surgery, Oncology, Reproductive Biology and Anaesthetics, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; ³Robert Steiner MR Unit, Imaging Sciences Department, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Automatic segmentation of the cortex from fetal brain MRI has potential as a significant tool in developmental neuroscience. We developed an accurate and robust method for extracting the cortex based on creating subject specific cortical priors using label propagation from automatically produced neonatal atlases. The method was tested on 12 fetal subjects with gestational age range from 20 -30 weeks, imaged using single shot Fast Spin Echo sequences with Slice to Volume (SVR) 3D reconstruction. The method was validated against manual segmentation and found to yield a mean error of 1.151.03mm.