Kiho IM (Harvard Medical School, brain development) has given a talk on Thursday 20, March. 

Short abstract:

The fetal brain goes through complex processes of neuronal migration, synaptogenesis, apoptosis, and myelination, to ultimately form the most complex known living organ. In vivo fetal MRI can improve the understanding of early brain development and the diagnostic accuracy for fetal brain abnormalities, leading to better prenatal counseling and clinical management. However, fetal brain structural changes are often too subtle to be detected by qualitative visual MRI inspection. Our research goal is to develop advanced fetal MRI processing and analysis techniques to provide biologically relevant imaging markers that help us to better understand prenatal brain development and aid in the detection of disease. We have proposed an automatic pipeline for fetal MRI processing and several advanced methodologies for quantifying and investigating local and regional cortical surface growth, sulcal pits and patterns development, and biological fetal brain age. We have applied our technologies to typically developing fetuses, fetuses with developmental brain disorders, and twin fetuses to understand the effects of genes, environment, and cerebral hemodynamics. In this presentation, we will discuss the potential of our methods as imaging markers that provide early and sensitive detection of abnormal brain development in individual subjects and predict their postnatal clinical outcomes.