Pelvic pain and endometriosis

Here, we introduce a method for estimating a 'growth chart' of the fetal cortex, i.e. for estimating the average cortical growth as well as the anatomical variability around this average during pregnancy.Methods: We use 148 healthy fetal brain MRI with gestational ages ranging from 17 to 37 weeks, originating from the FeTa dataset and the LUMIERE Plateform (Necker Hospital, Paris).Images are motion-corrected to reconstruct a volume of the fetal brain.After automatic segmentation of the cortex, a mesh of the cortical surface is generated.Our continuous model of the cortical growth is based on a geometrical deformation model, namely geodesic regression, a model analoguous to linear regression for shapes.Our construction method is compared with a conventional method, kernel regression, which estimates independent reference cortices at each gestational week.We assess the stability of each method, the similarity between the two models and the degree of realism of the modelled gyrification process.Results: Our method can generate stable results and has the ability to represent cortical folding as reliably as kernel regression, continuously and without introducing temporal inconsistencies.We also publish 21 reference cortices for the gestational weeks 17 to 37.Conclusions: Our open-source method is able to generate highly accurate reference cortices of the fetal brain during pregnancy.Compared to classical atlas building methods, it can also estimate the anatomical variability around the mean trajectory, which is promising for identifying gyrification delays in pathological subjects.