Fetal GAs prediction via geometric descriptors of cortical development

Motivation: Capture more nuanced aspects of fetal brain cortex development. Goal(s): Investigate the cortical surface of 65 fetal brain reconstructions from MRI examinations with global descriptors derived from scalar point-wise curvature-based metrics (H, K, SI, C, FI) and multidimensional point-wise shape signatures (HKS, WKS, SHOT). Approach: The morphometric properties extracted by these descriptors were provided as input to SVR models to predict the gestational age. Two public atlases and one dataset were adopted to train and test the models, respectively. Results: SHOT better encode the cerebral cortex development during pregnancy, achieving a prediction R2 of 0.89 and MAE of 6.3 days. Impact: SHOT provides researchers with sophisticated tool to capture more nuanced aspects of the fetal brain cortex development across gestational ages.