In-utero Three Dimension High Resolution Fetal Brain Diffusion Tensor Imaging

We present a methodology to achieve 3D high resolution in-utero fetal brain DTI that shows excellent ADC as well as promising FA maps. After continuous DTI scanning to acquire a repeated series of parallel slices with 15 diffusion directions, image registration is used to realign the images to correct for fetal motion. Once aligned, the diffusion images are treated as irregularly sampled data where each voxel is associated with an appropriately rotated diffusion direction, and used to estimate the diffusion tensor on a regular grid. The method has been tested successful on eight fetuses and has been validated on adults imaged at 1.5T.