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Abstract #0738

Development of Multi-Contrast Human Neonatal Brain Atlas

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.