Study of cortico-cortical connectivity and characterization of developing human fetal brain anatomy by diffusion tensor imaging

Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) is not only widely used in clinical study, but also a powerful probe to reveal the anatomy of post-mortem brains. DT-MRI based tractography is applied to in vivo human brain study non-invasively and provides the connectivity information which can hardly be accessed by traditional methods. There are few two dimensional (2D) or three dimensional (3D) human fetal brain atlases available. Further morphological study on the human fetal brain development is rarely found in the literature.; In this thesis research, I have studied in vivo human brain connectivity based on DT-MRI tractography and postmortem human fetal brain development with DT magnetic resonance microimaging (DT-MRMI). The two goals of the thesis study are (1) to broaden the understanding of cortico-cortical connectivity of in vivo human brain; and (2) to study the developing human fetal brain anatomy.; Four projects have been finished to achieve the first goal. They are (1) Noise analysis of multiple region of interest (ROI) and brute force tracking approach; (2) Characterization and correction of geometric distortion caused by B0-susceptibility in SENSE EPI-based diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) using manual landmark placement; (3) Parcellation and morphology study of midsagittal corpus callosum (CC) based on DTI tractography; and (4) Cortico-cortical connectivity revealed by cortical parcellation based on T1w images and white matter tractography based on DTI. Three projects have been done to attain the second goal. They are (1) Set up the 2D/3D human fetal brain MR atlas; (2) Understand the contrasts of DTI images of premature infant and detect anatomical abnormalities; and (3) Study the cortical and white matter development of human fetal brain with computational anatomy.