Infant brain MRI

To understand how premature birth affects long-term brain development we need to be able to measure growth and volumes of different brain structures at different time-points, specifically at birth, 1 year, 2 years and 6 years. The volume measurements of different populations of children will enable clinicians to answer questions, such as: Does the abnormal white matter and basal ganglia in neonates result in abnormal growth later on? Does the proportion of cortex to white matter follow the rules it should?

During my PhD at Imperial College London I first showed that we need age-specific atlases for young children and this was followed by development of subject-specific atlases that are created by registering number of segmented images to a new subject and averaging, followed by Expectation Maximisation segmentation. You can judge the quality of the resulting segmentation here:

This approach turned out to be very powerful and state-of-the art segmentation algorithms for developing brain are still based on this idea, such as DrawEM used for segmentation in processing pipeline of Developing Human Connectomme Project.

Relevant publications:

Segmentation of Brain MRI in Young Children. M Murgasova, L Dyet, AD Edwards, MA Rutherford, JV Hajnal, D Rueckert, Academic Radiology, 14(11), 2007.[pdf]

Robust segmentation of brain structures in MRI. M Murgasova, J Hajnal, AD Edwards, D Rueckert, ISBI 2009

Robust Segmentation of Brain MRI Using Combination of Registration and EM-based Methods. M Murgasova, L Dyet, D Edwards, M Rutherford, JV Hajnal, D Rueckert. SCCG 2007.

The Developing Human Connectome Project: a Minimal Processing Pipeline for Neonatal Cortical Surface Reconstruction. A Makropoulos, EC Robinson, A Schuh, R Wright, S Fitzgibbon, J Bozek, SJ Counsell, J Steinweg, K Vecchiato, J Passerat-Palmbach, G Lenz, F Mortari, T Tenev, EP Duff, M Bastiani, L Cordero Grande, EJ Hughes, N Tusor, JD Tournier, J Hutter, AN Price, RPAG Teixeira, M Murgasova, S Victor, CJ Kelly, MA Rutherford, SM Smith, AD Edwards, JV Hajnal, M Jenkinson, D Rueckert. NeuroImage 173, 2018. pdf

PhD thesis: Segmentation of brain MRI during early childhood. M Murgasova. Imperial College London, 2009.