PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Andreas Schuh
AU  - Antonios Makropoulos
AU  - Emma C. Robinson
AU  - Lucilio Cordero-Grande
AU  - Emer Hughes
AU  - Jana Hutter
AU  - Anthony Price
AU  - Maria Murgasova
AU  - Rui Pedro A. G. Teixeira
AU  - Nora Tusa
AU  - Johannes Steinweg
AU  - Suresh Victor
AU  - Mary A. Rutherford
AU  - Joseph V. Hajnal
AU  - David A. Edwards
AU  - Daniel Rueckert
TI  - Unbiased construction of a temporally consistent morphological atlas of neonatal brain development
AID  - 10.1101/251512
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 251512
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/22/251512.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/22/251512.full
AB  - Premature birth increases the risk of developing neurocognitive and neurobehavioural disorders. The mechanisms of altered brain development causing these disorders are yet unknown. Studying the morphology and function of the brain during maturation provides us not only with a better understanding of normal development, but may help us to identify causes of abnormal development and their consequences. A particular difficulty is to distinguish abnormal patterns of neurodevelopment from normal variation. The Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) seeks to create a detailed four-dimensional (4D) connectome of early life. This connectome may provide insights into normal as well as abnormal patterns of brain development. As part of this project, more than a thousand healthy fetal and neonatal brains will be scanned in vivo. This requires computational methods which scale well to larger data sets. We propose a novel groupwise method for the construction of a spatio-temporal model of mean morphology from cross-sectional brain scans at different gestational ages. This model scales linearly with the number of images and thus improves upon methods used to build existing public neonatal atlases, which derive correspondence between all pairs of images. By jointly estimating mean shape and longitudinal change, the atlas created with our method overcomes temporal inconsistencies, which are encountered when mean shape and intensity images are constructed separately for each time point. Using this approach, we have constructed a spatio-temporal atlas from 275 healthy neonates between 35 and 44 weeks post-menstrual age (PMA). The resulting atlas qualitatively preserves cortical details significantly better than publicly available atlases. This is moreover confirmed by a number of quantitative measures of the quality of the spatial normalisation and sharpness of the resulting template brain images.