Combined Quantitative T2*Map and Structural T2-Weighted Tissue-Specific Analysis for Fetal Brain MRI: Pilot Automated Pipeline

Over the past decade, automated 3D reconstruction and segmentation has been widely applied to processing and analysis of fetal MRI. While the majority of reported methods primarily focus on structural brain imaging, additional quantitative T2* information could improve characterisation of changes in functional tissue properties. In this work, we propose a first solution for automated combined tissue-specific analysis of 3D quantitative T2* map and structural T2-weighted (T2w) fetal brain MRI. We build upon the existing 3D structural brain analysis pipeline from SVRTK by adding fully automated 3D T2* reconstructions globally aligned to 3D segmented T2w images (already reconstructed in the standard radiological space) followed by deep learning T2* tissue parcellation. In addition, we assess the general applicability the proposed pipeline by analysing brain growth trajectories in 26 control T2w+T2* fetal MRI datasets from 20-28 weeks GA range.