A Tool to Investigate Symmetry Properties of Newborns Brain: The Newborns’ Symmetric Brain Atlas

Abstract

It is well established that the two hemispheres of the human brain exhibit a certain degree of asymmetry. Postmortem studies of developing brains of pre- and postpartum infants have shown that already in this early stage of development Heschl gyrus, planum temporale and superior temporal sulcus (STS) exhibit pronounced asymmetry. Advances in acquisition and computational evaluation of high-resolution magnetic resonance images provide enhanced tools for noninvasive studies of brain asymmetry in newborns. Until now most atlases used for image processing contain themselves asymmetry and may thus introduce and/or increase asymmetry already contained in the original data of brain structural or functional images. So, it is preferable to avoid the application of these asymmetric atlases. Thus, in this paper we present our framework to create a symmetric brain atlas from a group of newborns aged between 39 and 42 weeks after gestation. The resulting atlas demonstrates no difference between its original and its flipped version as should be the case for an asymmetric atlas. Consequently, the resulting symmetric atlas can be used for applications such as analysis of development of brain asymmetry in the context of language development.