An ISO-surface folding analysis method applied to premature neonatal brain development

摘要

In this paper we describe the application of folding measures to tracking in vivo cortical brain development in premature neonatal brain anatomy. The outer gray matter and the gray-white matter interface surfaces were extracted from semi-interactively segmented high-resolution T1 MRI data. Nine curvature- and geometric descriptor-based folding measures were applied to six premature infants, aged 28-37 weeks, using a direct voxel-wise iso-surface representation. We have shown that using such an approach it is feasible to extract meaningful surfaces of adequate quality from typical clinically acquired neonatal MRI data. We have shown that most of the folding measures, including a new proposed measure, are sensitive to changes in age and therefore applicable in developing a model that tracks development in premature infants. For the first time gyrification measures have been computed on the gray-white matter interface and on cases whose age is representative of a period of intense brain development.