KEYNOTE SPEECH I

Abstract

Prenatal brain development is associated postnatal neurodevelopmental outcomes, if defective, can cause high-risk neurodevelopmental disabilities. As fetal interventions for brain malformations psychiatric/neurological brain disorders are emerging, it is of great interest to develop technologies to characterize early brain development in the fetal brain in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); investigate several diseases genetic/environmental effects; detect abnormal brain development early understits underlying mechanisms. We developed state-of-the-art techniques to automatically process fetal MRI including deep-learning-based automatic fetal brain extraction cortical tissue segmentation, accurate 3D cortical surface reconstruction; automatic parcellation labeling of cortical areas. Moreover, innovative MRI-based features methods for cortical growth analysis have been developed. We examined regional cortical thickness gyrification as well as geometric topological patterns of cortical folds in typically developing fetal brains fetuses developmental disorders: cortical malformations, agenesis of the corpus callosum, congenital heart disease, ventriculomegaly, Down syndrome. Our novel technologies have demonstrated superior sensitivity in explaining the inter-subject variability of fetal brain structural development detecting early brain abnormalities compared to conventional technologies.

Dr. Kiho Im
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School

Staff Scientist in the Division of Newborn Medicine, Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging & Developmental Science Center (FNNDSC) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH)

Biography
Dr. Kiho Im received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Hanyang University, South Korea in 2009, began postdoctoral training as a Research Fellow in the HMS/BCH, FNNDSC. During his tenure at BCH, his expertise lies within neuroimaging analysis structural diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). His goal is to provide unique biologically relevant imaging biomarkers that not only help us to better understnormal abnormal brain development, but also aid in the detection diagnosis of disease. He developed advanced methodologies for quantifying the complex topology of brain cortical folding patterns brain white matter connectivity/network. These methods led to the discovery that different brain disorders such as polymicrogyria; tuberous sclerosis complex; TUBB3 syndrome; developmental dyslexia; traumatic brain injury; cerebral palsy, have different effects on brain folding connectivity. Dr. Im has collaborated world-renowned neuroscientists geneticists including Dr. Christopher Walsh Dr. Elizabeth Engle at BCH, providing a more accurate unbiased characterization of brain folding connectivity in patients these disorders as well as in genetically-modified animal models of disease. These collaborations have resulted in co-authored papers in Science (2014), Nature (2018), Neuron (2018), Cerebral Cortex (2018) where Dr. Im’s contribution is his unique image analysis.