Construction of a Dynamic 4D Probabilistic Atlas for the Developing Brain

Maria Murgasova¹, Latha Srinivasan², Ioannis S. Gousias², Paul Aljabar¹, Joseph V. Hajnal², A David Edwards², Daniel Rueckert¹

Probabilistic atlases have been established in the literature as a standard tool for enhancing the intensity-based classification of brain MRI. The rapidly growing neonatal brain requires an age-specific spatial probabilistic atlas to guide the segmentation process. In this paper we describe a method for dynamically creating a probabilistic atlas for any chosen stage of neonatal brain development. We present an atlas created from the segmentations of 153 subjects providing prior tissue probability maps for six structures - cortex, white matter, subcortical gray matter, brainstem and cerebellum, for ages of 29 to 44 weeks of gestation.