%0 Journal Article %A L. Zhao %A J.D. Asis-Cruz %A X. Feng %A Y. Wu %A K. Kapse %A A. Largent %A J. Quistorff %A C. Lopez %A D. Wu %A K. Qing %A C. Meyer %A C. Limperopoulos %T Automated 3D Fetal Brain Segmentation Using an Optimized Deep Learning Approach %D 2022 %R 10.3174/ajnr.A7419 %J American Journal of Neuroradiology %P 448-454 %V 43 %N 3 %X BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: MR imaging provides critical information about fetal brain growth and development. Currently, morphologic analysis primarily relies on manual segmentation, which is time-intensive and has limited repeatability. This work aimed to develop a deep learning–based automatic fetal brain segmentation method that provides improved accuracy and robustness compared with atlas-based methods.MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 106 fetal MR imaging studies were acquired prospectively from fetuses between 23 and 39 weeks of gestation. We trained a deep learning model on the MR imaging scans of 65 healthy fetuses and compared its performance with a 4D atlas-based segmentation method using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The trained model was also evaluated on data from 41 fetuses diagnosed with congenital heart disease.RESULTS: The proposed method showed high consistency with the manual segmentation, with an average Dice score of 0.897. It also demonstrated significantly improved performance (P < .001) based on the Dice score and 95% Hausdorff distance in all brain regions compared with the atlas-based method. The performance of the proposed method was consistent across gestational ages. The segmentations of the brains of fetuses with high-risk congenital heart disease were also highly consistent with the manual segmentation, though the Dice score was 7% lower than that of healthy fetuses.CONCLUSIONS: The proposed deep learning method provides an efficient and reliable approach for fetal brain segmentation, which outperformed segmentation based on a 4D atlas and has been used in clinical and research settings.BSbrain stemCGMcortical GMCNNconvolutional neural networkCHDcongenital heart diseaseDGMdeep GMGAgestational age %U https://www.ajnr.org/content/ajnr/43/3/448.full.pdf