Hao Huang1, 2, Tina Jeon1, Linda Richards3, Paul Yarowsky4, Horst R. Zielke5, Susumu Mori6
1Advanced Imaging Research Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States; 2Department of Radiology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States; 3Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia; 4Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, United States; 5Pediatrics, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, United States; 6Department of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States
Anatomical abnormality of human brains at the fetal stage is highly related to neurodevelopmental disorders at infancy and childhood. A population-averaged high resolution atlas at 20 weeks of gestation (wg), around the middle point of prenatal development, is essential for fetal evaluation which may lead to life-saving diagnosis and therapy for the extremely preterm babies. In this study, with high resolution DTI data with isotropic resolution 0.29mm from 10 postmortem fetal brain samples at around 20wg, we established a population-averaged human fetal brain DTI atlas by applying linear affine and large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) transformation.
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