Normative volumetric growth modeling of the whole fetal body, placenta and amniotic fluid for 3-dimensional T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging

作者：Alena Uus, Megan Hall, Chris Bradshaw, Anangsha Kumar, Jordina Aviles Verdera, Sara Neves Silva, Aysha Luis, Hadi Waheed, P. Gil, Cordero-Grande Lucilio, Jacqueline Matthew, Vanessa Kyriakopoulou, Maria Deprez, Kathleen Colford, Alexia Egloff Collado, Joseph V. Hajnal, Mary Rutherford, Jana Hutter, Lisa Story · 发表于：medRxiv · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.64898/2026.01.16.26344259 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Fetal and Pediatric Neurological Disorders、Pregnancy and preeclampsia studies、Preterm Birth and Chorioamnionitis

Background: Volumetric assessment of the fetus, placenta and amniotic fluid is clinically valuable, but MRI volumetry is rarely performed in clinical practice because of the required labour-intensive manual segmentation of motion-corrupted 2-dimensional (2-D) stacks. Existing deep-learning approaches typically segment single structures in 2-D motion-corrupted stacks, are, however limited in accuracy by slice misalignment. No current method provides a reliable automated solution for whole-uterus volumetry in 3-D reconstructed MRI. Furthermore, normative ranges for computation of centiles are currently missing. Objective: To develop an automated pipeline for whole-uterus volumetry in 3-D T2-weighted fetal MRI and to generate normative growth models for fetal, placental and amniotic fluid volumes in healthy pregnancies with confirmed delivery at term. Materials and methods: Deformable slice-to-volume 3-D reconstruction was applied to motion-corrupted T2-weighted (T2W) stacks from 0.55T-3T MRI, and a 3-D UNet was trained to segment fetus, placenta and amniotic fluid on the resulting reconstructed 3-D images. A reporting tool generates centiles, z-scores and structured HTML outputs. Automated segmentation was performed in 357 healthy control datasets from 16-41 weeks gestational age (GA) range with confirmed delivery at term. After visual checks of segmeted labels and minor refinements, GA-based quadratic normative volumetry models were derived and correlations with maternal and f...