Parcellation of the neonatal cortex using Surface-based Melbourne Children’s Regional Infant Brain atlases (M-CRIB-S)

Longitudinal studies measuring changes in cortical morphology over time are best facilitated by parcellation schemes compatible across all life stages. The Melbourne Children’s Regional Infant Brain (M-CRIB) and M-CRIB 2.0 atlases provide voxel-based parcellations of the cerebral cortex compatible with the Desikan-Killiany (DK) and the Desikan-Killiany-Tourville (DKT) cortical labelling schemes. This study introduces surface-based versions of the M-CRIB and M-CRIB 2.0 atlases, termed M-CRIB-S(DK) and M-CRIB-S(DKT), with a pipeline for automated parcellation utilizing FreeSurfer and developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) tools. Using T₂-weighted magnetic resonance images of healthy neonates (n = 58), we created average spherical templates of cortical curvature and sulcal depth. Manually labelled regions in a subset (n = 10) were encoded into the spherical template space to construct M-CRIB-S(DK) and M-CRIB-S(DKT) atlases. Labelling accuracy was assessed using Dice overlap and boundary discrepancy measures with leave-one-out cross-validation. Cross-validated labelling accuracy was high for both atlases (average regional Dice = 0.79–0.83). Worst-case boundary discrepancy instances ranged from 9.96–10.22 mm, which appeared to be driven by variability in anatomy for some cases. The M-CRIB-S atlas data and automatic pipeline allow extraction of neonatal cortical surfaces labelled according to the DK or DKT parcellation schemes.