Examining the in-utero development of brain structure with fetal MRI, acquired as part of the Developing Human Connectome Project

This study aims to apply different neuroimaging analysis tools to investigate the structural development of the brain in early life, focussing mainly on the fetal period using in utero MRI. The project will involve analysis of T2-weighted structural and diffusion-weighted MRI data, to explore whether there is quantifiable and significant change between the growth trajectories of different brain regions and tissue types in both cross-sectional and longitudinal cohorts.

The project will use state-of-the-art high-resolution multi-shell motion-corrected diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI), collected as part of the developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), to characterize normative in utero maturation of white matter microstructure. The project will use tractography delineate the brain's major white-matter pathways and explore different approaches to characterise their developmental ontogenies during the second to third trimester, aiming to relate the evolution of the diffusion MRI-derived signal changes to previous histological literature. The project will also investigate how the properties of the diffusion MRI signal can be related to other neuroimaging modalities, such as fMRI networks and cortical surface-derived metrics. With these methods, the project aims to provide a detailed, accurate reference of the unique developing microstructure in the fetal brain that improves mechanistic insight about fibre maturation and how it relates to other features of brain development, bridging the gap between MRI and histology. We can then use our normative reference to compare with clinical cohorts, to gain significant insight into the abnormalities in connectivity that can occur as a result of perinatal injury or other diseases affecting fetal neurodevelopment.