FETLAS

Assessing Fetal Brain Development Based on a Spatio-Temporal in vivo Atlas Learned from Ultra-Fast Magnetic Resonance Images, funded by a DOC-fFORTE-fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Team: Eva Dittrich, Georg Langs, Gregor Kasprian, Peter C. Brugger, Daniela Prayer

New imaging techniques like fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) enable novel insights into the earliest growth processes that take place during pregnancy. In particular, the development of the fetal brain can be studied for the first time, and it is a new challenge to provide a profound understanding of the fetal cerebral anatomy. In addition to explaining and modeling this new data, it will also provide an improved early diagnosis of brain deformation as well as pathological alterations of metabolic processes. To this end, the research project will build a spatio-temporal atlas of the fetal brain development.

Recent publications:

• Atlas learning in fetal brain development. E. Dittrich, G. Kasprian, D. Prayer, and G. Langs. Topics in Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Fetal MRI (2011) 22(3): 107-111.
• Learning a spatio-temporal latent atlas for fetal brain segmentation. E. Dittrich, T. Riklin-Raviv, G. Kasprian, P. Brugger, D. Prayer and G. Langs. Proceedings of the MICCAI 2011 Workshop on Image Analysis of Human Brain Development (IAHBD 2011), Toronto, Canada.
• Fetal Brain Segmentation Based on a Spatio-temporal Latent Atlas. E. Dittrich, T. Riklin-Raviv, G. Kasprian, P. Brugger, D. Prayer and G. Langs. Accepted talk RSNA 2011, Chicago, USA.