dhcp_fetal_brain_surface_atlas/README.md

dhcp_fetal_brain_surface_atlas

Fetal brain surface atlas, weeks 21-36 of gestation, constructed using 242 in-utero scans from the fetal dHCP cohort.

The following surfaces were generated: pial, mid-thickness, white matter and very inflated. The maps of changes in cortical morphology - sulcal depth, curvature, and thickness - are also available

Pictures of the white matter surface (right hemisphere) are here:

The template was generated by adapting the procedure developed for the neonatal surface atlas in Bozek et al. (2018 NeuroImage, 179, 11–29), which iteratively refines templates through a repeated alignment of individuals to a common space using the MSM algorithm. The first stage was to generate a common reference space, which was initialised via affine sulcal-depth-based registration to the dHCP neonatal GW36 template. From this, an initial set of age-specific templates was then generated through adaptive kernel-weighted averaging of co-registered surfaces, where weights were given by a Gaussian kernel, centered at each GW, with width adapted for each template to compensate for differences in the number of available scans. At subsequent 5 iterations, age-specific templates were obtained through non-rigid MSM alignment of all examples to the template from the previous iteration. This was driven by sulcal depth (for the 2nd iteration) and mean curvature thereafter.

The abstract was submitted to OHBM. Further details and an appropriate link to citation will follow. For any issues please write to: slava.karolis@kcl.ac.uk