Brain Simulation Essay

Neonatal Developing brain parcellated atlases Gilmore et. al. parcellated the brain of 74 neonates using anatomical expertise into 38 ROIs for the purpose of studying the gray matter growth and the asymmetry in the neonatal brain (131). In this study, the individual parcellation maps are used for comparison between individual brains. Gousias et. al designed a delineation protocol to manually parcellate the brains of 20 preterm and term neonates into 50 ROIs (132) based on macro-anatomical landmarks. In this work, all brains where segmented region by region by same rater instead of brain by brain. The resulted template, which includes 20 neonate brains with their parcellation maps, called a label-based encephalic ROI template (ALBERT). Out of these 20 parcellation map, Gousias et. al constructed different atlases based on the age at scan using pairwise registration and label fusion (133). The result consist of 40 atlases where each atlas is the result of label fusion of the remaining 19 ALBERTs (20 atlases), 14 ALBERTs in the cases of preterms (15 …show more content…
In fact, if the brain undergoes significant changes in shape, size and structure, as in the case of neonatal brain during early development (17), it has no reliable folding patterns to drive the registration in the case of registration-based parcellation or to rely on in the case of segmentation-based parcellation. Moreover, parcellating it based on a mature brain template introduces a bias since several studies suggested that developing brain analysis needs to be independently performed than mature brain due to significant differences in brain tissue properties, image intensities appearance, and anatomical shapes (23, 127,