Estimation of Fetal Brain Volume from MRI of Human Fetus
Journal Title: Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research (BJSTR) - Year 2018, Vol 9, Issue 2
Abstract
Monitoring of fetal brain growth during the pregnancy period is essential to have a healthy fetus. Fetal brain volume is a biomarker to identify any deformity in the fetal brain. In this paper we propose a method to estimate the fetal brain volume by manually segmenting the MRI of human fetus. Introduction The human fetus undergoes rapid changes in every gestational week (GW). The fetus is to be monitored by an obstetrician for its healthy growth. An important organ that is to be monitored is the fetal brain. Fetal brain starts developing from the 3rd GW and continue to grow in its shape and structure [1]. Some of the abnormalities that may occur in the central nervous system (CNS) in the early stages are encephalocele, anencephaly, hydrocephalus and microcephaly [2]. To understand the pathology and structure of the fetus, non-invasive imaging techniques such as ultrasound (US) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are used. MRI is more suitable to image soft tissues such as brain and also gives a high contrast image. Identification of brain abnormalities helps to make informed decisions like termination of pregnancy (TOP) or in utero fetal death (IUFD) [3]. Votino et al. [3] have estimated the brain volume using MRI and weight using autopsy of the fetal brain. Estimation of fetal brain at different GW helps to identify normal and abnormal brain growth [4,5]. Estimating the brain volume through MR imaging has become an accepted technique [6,7] In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the fetal brain volume from MRI of human fetus in the range of 20-38 GW by extracting the brain portion manually by an expert. We used twenty volumes of retrospective T2 - weighted singleshot fast spin echo (SSFSE) MRI collected from Sri Ramachandra Medical University and Hospital, Chennai, India. Ethical approval was granted by the Ethical Committee (ethics no. IEC-NI/14/ OCT/43/65) of the same University. The datasets were imaged between 20 and 38 GW. Brain portion in all the volumes were manually segmented by a medical expert specialized in the fetal brain anatomy and are used for estimating the brain volume. The details of the dataset are given in Table 1. The data sets pertain to different subjects. This set was arranged to cover range of 20-38 GW period to form 12 volumes from the 20 sets. To estimate the fetal brain volume, we make use of the manually segmented fetal brain images. Fetal brain area is calculated for every MRI slice in the data set. An MR imaging volume contains collection of slices. Each slice displays an area of anatomy as the field of view (FOV). The FOV is divided into pixels. Every pixel of an MR image corresponds to a voxel, a volume element, whose value represents the tissue and MR signal, respectively. The volume of a voxel depends on MR imaging parameters, i.e. slice thickness (ST) and pixel spacing (Figure 1a). The physical thickness is specified in the parameters embedded in the MR image. Between two slices there will be a gap called inter slice gap (ISG) (Figure 1b).
Authors and Affiliations
Gayathri SP, Praveenkumar S, Somasundaram K, Siva Shankar R, Klaiselvi T, Magesh S
Keywords
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- EP ID EP588476
- DOI 10.26717/BJSTR.2018.09.001774
- Views 177
- Downloads 0
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