Development of cortical surface based tools for healthy control infants

目前还没有公开可用的分割工具和地图集，可以自动标记人类 脑MRI图像和表征0至5岁年龄范围内的神经解剖学。全面发展 适用于这一人群的自动化、高度准确和强大的后处理工具已经 与为成年人推出的计划相比，由于一些因素， 从不依从的新生儿和幼儿中获取数据， 不能同意的受试者，以及关键的是， 婴儿的发展。此外，大多数现有的成像数据是从临床上获得的。 受试者（例如，早产儿），不能用于表征婴儿的正常变化 这是一个很好的方法，可以为健康和疾病之间的进一步定量比较提供基线。 我们认为，地图集和图像处理工具首先要适应并引入， 健康的对照人群。在拟议的项目中，我们打算开发一个兼容FreeSurfer的管道 当与标准临床MRI采集一起使用时，将计算皮质和皮质下分割 映射并创建拓扑正确和几何准确的白色物质和软脑膜表面。此外，本发明还 这些表面将用于驱动新颖的成对和成组配准方法， 2D和3D地图集形式的对应关系和年龄相关信息。这项工作将在 MGH/哈佛/麻省理工学院马蒂诺斯生物医学成像中心与波士顿儿童中心合作， 医院，在那里我们将利用先进的成像设施以及领先的成像和 临床专业知识。

Currently there are no publicly available segmentation tools and atlases that would automatically label human brain MRI images and characterize neuroanatomy in the age range of 0 to 5 years. The development of fully automated, highly accurate and robust post-processing tools applicable to this population has been significantly lagging compared to those introduced for adults given a number of factors - the difficulty of obtaining data from non-compliant neonates and toddlers, ethical issues regarding research imaging of subjects who cannot consent, and critically, the rapid change in contrast and geometry displayed during development in infants. Additionally, the majority of the existing imaging data are obtained from clinical subjects (for example, for premature borns), that cannot be used to characterize normal variation in the infant population and thus to produce a baseline for further quantitative comparison between healthy and disease. We believe that it is crucial that atlases and image processing tools are first adapted and introduced for a healthy control population. During the proposed project, we intend to develop a FreeSurfer-compatible pipeline that, when used with standard clinical MRI acquisitions, will compute cortical and subcortical segmentation maps and create topologically correct and geometrically accurate white matter and pial surfaces. Additionally, such surfaces will be used to drive novel pair- and group-wise registration methods to encode spatial correspondences and age-related information in the form of 2D and 3D atlases. This work will be performed at the MGH/Harvard/MIT Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in collaboration with the Boston Children's Hospital, where we will take advantage of the cutting-edge imaging facilities as well as leading imaging and clinical expertise.