An Automated Processing Pipeline for Diffusion MRI in the Baby Connectome Project
Abstract
Processing baby diffusion MRI (dMRI) data is challenging due to the low and spatially-varying diffusion anisotropy, rendering standard analysis techniques developed for adult data inapplicable. Here, we present a fully-automated processing pipeline for baby dMRI, tailored particularly to the data collected in the Baby Connectome Project (BCP).
The human brain is arguably the most complex system in biology and yet its macroscopic layout is nearly complete by the time of term birth. The infant brain develops rapidly during the first years of life, posing significant challenges to precise quantification of rapid dynamic changes that occur during this critical period of brain development.
The increasing availability of longitudinal baby MRI data, such as those acquired through the Baby Connectome Project (BCP), affords unprecedented opportunity for precise charting of early brain developmental trajectories in order to understand normative and aberrant growth.
We describe here an automated processing pipeline for baby dMRI, consisting of (i) image quality control (IQC) for distinguishing between good and poor quality data, (ii) anatomy-guided correction for eddy-current and susceptibility-induced distortions, (iii) tissue microstructural analysis, and (iv) reconstruction of white matter (WM) pathways.
Methods
DMRI acquisition
In the BCP, diffusion-weighted (DW) images were acquired using Siemens 3T Magnetom Prisma MRI scanners with a $140 times 140$ imaging matrix, $1.5 times 1.5 times 1.5 ,mm^3$ resolution, $TE=88 , ms$, $TR=2,365 , ms$, 32-channel receiver coil, and $b=500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 3000 , s/mm^2$, covered by a total of 144 noncollinear gradient directions for either posterior-anterior or anterior-posterior phase-encoding directions (PEDs). 6 non-DW images were collected for each PED.
Image quality control (IQC)
The DW images are annotated as “pass” (no/minor artifacts), “questionable” (moderate artifacts), or “fail” (heavy artifacts). The IQC framework utilizes a nonlocal residual network to first examine the quality of each imaging slice. Slice-level features are then agglomerated for volume-level quality assessment, which is in turn used to arrive at the assessment outcome at the subject-level. Subjects annotated as “fail” are excluded from subsequent processing and analysis.
Distortion correction
The DW images associated with each PED are first corrected for eddy-current distortion by affine registration followed by coarse deformable registration to their corresponding non-DW image using ANTs. To correct for susceptibility-induced distortion, we first compute the spherical mean images (SMIs) of the eddy-current corrected DW images, and jointly register the SMIs of all shells and the non-DW images to the corresponding aligned T1-weighted (T1w) and T2-weighted (T2w) images. The corrected DW images for both PEDs are obtained by one-time warping of the original DW images via composed deformation fields. Finally, the warped DW images for opposite PEDs are combined via the signal harmonic mean.
Tissue microstructure
A recent method called spherical mean spectrum imaging (SMSI) is used to quantify tissue microarchitecture. SMSI allows a wide variety of features, such as intracellular volume fraction (ICVF), extracellular volume fraction (ECVF), free-water volume fraction, intra-soma volume fraction, anisotropy, and orientation coherence index, to be computed for comprehensive microstructural analysis. SMSI characterizes the whole fine- to coarse-scale diffusion spectrum and is hence well suited for capturing dynamic microstructural changes in the baby brain. SMSI has been recently demonstrated to show greater sensitivity to developmental changes via a multivariate framework, revealing distinct longitudinal patterns of both cortical and subcortical areas.
White matter pathways
WM tractography is generated by fiber tracking using super-resolution asymmetry spectrum imaging (ASI). ASI fits a mixture of asymmetric fiber orientation distribution function (FODF) to the diffusion signal. WM tractograms are then generated by successively following local directions determined from the FODFs. ASI-based tractography mitigates the gyral bias problem common in existing tractography algorithms and improves cortico-cortical connectivity in the baby brain. We employ TractDL for fast and robust identification of fiber bundles of interest from a large number of streamlines. More than 160 anatomical WM pathways are identified consistently.
References
Wu, Y., Ahmad, S., Huynh, K.M., Liu, S., Thung, KH., Lin, W., P.-T. Yap, 2021. An Automated Processing Pipeline for Diffusion MRI in the Baby Connectome Project, ISMRM, May 15-20, 2021.