J. H.
Gilmorehttp://www.earlybrainresearch.unc.edu/studies.html
Imaging the Early Developing Brain: Challenges and
Potential Impact
Workshop at MICCAI 2008
Organizers:
Guido Gerig (
John H. Gilmore
(UNC)
Alan Evans (MNI)
Daniel Rueckert (
Simon Warfield
(Children’s Hospital Boston)
Rationale:
Imaging studies of early brain development
get increasing attention as improved modeling of the pattern of normal
development and of change from normal might lead to a better understanding of
origin, timing and nature of morphologic and functional differences in neurodevelopmental disorders. Measuring the trajectory of
growth via noninvasive imaging such as structural MRI and DTI, for example,
will likely provide a vastly improved understanding of early brain development,
changes due to delayed development or pathology, and its relationship to neuropsychiatric disorders.
Studying the age group from birth to 5 years, even including premature
born babies, involves several major challenges which are specific to neuroimaging of this age group. Most important are the
imaging of non-sedated infants with low failure rate, in particular in
longitudinal studies, and the development of appropriate image analysis
methodologies that can cope with low contrast-to-noise ratio, rapid change of
size of brain structures, complex brightness
changes in MRI reflecting rapid white matter structuring through myelination and axon elimination, rapid change and large
variability of anatomical shapes, and locally varying contrast associated with
early structuring. The study of growth trajectories by definition involves
longitudinal imaging and will require application of computational tools for
processing of 4D data (3D plus time) and statistical methods for longitudinal
data analysis.
Goals
of the workshop are the following:
·
to introduce the topics of early brain
development, pediatric imaging and its challenges, and association
of structures and patterns observed in images to what is known about the
underlying neurobiology,
·
to
introduce the clinical need and potential impact for studies of early brain development,
including the need for normative data to model trajectories of normal brain
development, the motivation for early diagnosis of children at risk for mental
illness and neurological disorders, the ability to study rare diseases,
monitoring treatment and intervention, and image modalities appropriate for
this age group,
·
to
inform about publicly available image databases of pediatric imaging
studies to test, validate and develop advanced computational tools,
·
to
discuss the current status of image analysis methodology and emerging
new approaches to study early brain growth and change from normal (including
segmentation, registration, atlas-building, computational anatomy tools,
analysis of MRI, DTI, ultrasound, and more),
·
to
discuss validation and cross-method comparison of image analysis,
·
and finally to do
brainstorming on key issues critical to further advance the field.
Format:
The workshop
includes invited talks by representatives from different institutions strongly
involved in pediatric neuroimaging studies and
analysis of such data and also short poster teaser presentations and posters of
submitted abstracts. Participants are encouraged to use the discussion time
after presentations and the brainstorming and panel sessions for a critical
dialogue to clarify the state-of-the-art and formulate outstanding issues both w.r.t. imaging technology, image analysis challenges, and
fundamental mathematical and algorithmic issues related to this type of
longitudinal data presenting rapid change of contrast, size, shapes and
appearance. The workshop will also inform about availability of image
databases, pediatric atlases, and tools.
Participants will
get pdf copies of talks and presentations (ready on
CD at workshop).
Intended audience:
Researchers from
medicine, biology, imaging, bioengineering, image analysis, and biostatistics,
among others, who are interested or already involved in studies of early brain
development in healthy and disease, and also researchers who are developing
imaging/image analysis technologies which are of particular interest to study
this type of image data.