Automatic Measurement of Extra-Axial CSF from Infant MRI Data

摘要

The quantification of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the human brain has shown to play an important role in earlypostnatal brain development. Extra-axial fluid (EA-CSF), which is characterized by CSF in the subarachnoidspace, is a promising marker for the early detection of children at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, such asAutism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Yet, non-ventricular CSF quantification, in particular extra-axial CSFquantification, is not supported in the major neuro-imaging software solutions, such as FreeSurfer. Most currentstructural image analysis packages mask out the extra-axial CSF space in one of the first pre-processing steps. Aquantitative protocol was previously developed by our group to objectively measure the volume of total EA-CSFvolume using a pipeline workflow implemented in a series of python scripts. While this solution worked for ourspecific lab, a graphical user interface-based tool is necessary to facilitate the computation of extra-axial CSFvolume across a wide array of neuroimaging studies and research labs. This paper presents the development of anovel open-source, cross-platform, user-friendly software tool, called Auto-EACSF, for the automaticcomputation of such extra-axial CSF volume. Auto-EACSF allows neuroimaging labs to quantify extra-axial CSFin their neuroimaging studies in order to investigate its role in normal and atypical brain development.