Corpus Callosum Agenesis (CCA), one of the most common congenital anomalies, has uncertain neurodevelopmental outcome, especially when the disease is isolated. To provide parents with informed counselling, it is crucial to identify anatomical markers linked to a predicted outcome early in pregnancy. Quantitative exploration of fetal brains with CCA is rare and has been mostly limited to the study of specific brain structures. Here, we propose a pipeline to analyse fetal brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) that is based on diffeomorphic transformation. It consists in two steps: a semi-automatic fetal MRI preprocessing procedure and a pipeline to quantify anatomical deviations from normal development. Following MRI preprocessing, each volumetric fetal brain is compared to an age-matched healthy template brain at a global scale using registration. Deformations are parallel transported to the same space to correct age differences between fetuses. Deformation modes specific to CCA are identified using Principal Component Analysis and classification. The pipeline is tested on retrospectively selected MRIs from 38 healthy fetuses and 73 fetuses with CCA. In accordance with more local analyses, the most relevant deformation mode for classification combines well-known alterations of brains with CCA. This preliminary work is promising for the quantitative exploration of abnormal fetal brains and will be used in the future to identify anatomical features correlated to poor clinical outcome.

Organic food consumption and its effects on health remain understudied in adults and in children. The aim of this study was to describe family characteristics associated with feeding infants organic foods during the complementary feeding period. The analysis included 9764 children from the French Étude Longitudinale Française depuis l’Enfance (ELFE) birth cohort. In addition to telephone interviews conducted at 2, 12 and 24 months, a monthly questionnaire about milk feeding and complementary foods (including organic foods) was completed by parents between 3 and 10 months. Associations between family characteristics and feeding with organic foods during complementary feeding were analysed by multivariable multinomial logistic regression. Overall, 51 % of infants never consumed organic food during the complementary feeding period (up to 10 months), 24 % sometimes, 15 % often and 9 % always or almost always. As compared with infants never fed organic foods, those ‘often’ or ‘always’ fed organic foods were born to older mothers, with higher education level or family income, and lower pre-pregnancy BMI. As compared with never-smoking women, women who had stopped smoking before pregnancy were more likely to feed their infant organic foods. Feeding with organic foods was also related to long breast-feeding duration and later introduction to complementary foods. To conclude, associations between feeding with organic foods and family socio-economic position as well as infant feeding practices need to be considered when studying the impact of organic foods on children’s health and development.

We propose to establish a continuous trajectory of brain growth across pregnancy using geodesic regression in the Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping framework. One is usually faced with two issues when estimating high dimensional transformations: the elevated risk of trapping the optimization in an unrealistic local minimum and the fact that deformations are constrained to a single scale. To tackle these issues, we introduce a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy based on multiscale parametrizations of objects and deformations. Experiments on fetal brain Magnetic Resonance Images show that the multiscale strategy can generate more natural images of the fetal brain across pregnancy, which offers an interesting perspective for the quantitative analysis of normal and abnormal brain growth.