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Abstract #0794

Diffeomorphic Construction of a Normative Spatiotemporal Fetal Brain MRI Template

Ali Gholipour1, Catherine Limperopoulos2, Cedric Clouchoux2, Alireza Akhondi-Asl1, Judy A. Estroff1, Simon K. Warfield1

1Department of Radiology, Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; 2Children's National Medical Center, Washington, DC, United States


The MRI study of the developing brain is challenged by the difficulty of scanning neonates and fetuses, and the rapid changes in the brain anatomy. The recent advances in volumetric fetal brain MRI have enabled the construction of spatiotemporal templates. The anatomic variations are encoded by probability maps in probabilistic templates, but are encoded in the deformation fields in deformable templates. While the recent work has focused on probabilistic spatiotemporal template construction to characterize normal fetal brain development, this work has focused on deformable spatiotemporal template construction; and suggests kernel regression integrated with symmetric normalization for diffeomorphic spatiotempral template construction.