Automatic Parcellation of Longitudinal Cortical Surfaces

We present a novel automatic method to parcellate the cortical surfaces of the neonatal brain longitudinal atlas at different stages of development. A labeled brain atlas of newborn at 41 weeks gestational age (GA) is used to propagate labels of anatomical regions of interest to an unlabeled spatio-temporal atlas, which provides a dynamic model of brain development at each week between 28-44 GA weeks. First, labels from the cortical volume of the labeled newborn brain are propagated to an age-matched cortical surface from the spatio-temporal atlas. Then, labels are propagated across the cortical surfaces of each week of the spatio-temporal atlas by registering successive cortical surfaces using a novel approach and an energy optimization function. This procedure incorporates local and global, spatial and temporal information when assigning the labels to each surface. The result is a complete parcellation of 17 neonatal brain surfaces of the spatio-temporal atlas with similar points per labels distributions across weeks.