Abstract
Studies have shown that the non-biological site-related effects may induce bias in multisite neuroimaging studies among adults and adolescents. It is unknown how site effects would affect fetal brain MRI and which acquisition factors are critical in quantitative analysis. In this study, we identified site effects, including manufacture, field strength, in-plane resolution, and slice thickness on structural subcortical volume and cortical thickness measurements in normal fetuses. We also showed these site effects could be effectively removed with ComBat-GAM while preserving developmental patterns indicating that the harmonization procedure is necessary when combing multisite imaging data to study fetal brain morphological development.
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Xu, X. et al. (2024). Site Effects in Multisite Fetal Brain MRI: A Morphological Study of Early Brain Development. In: Wang, G., Yao, D., Gu, Z., Peng, Y., Tong, S., Liu, C. (eds) 12th Asian-Pacific Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering. APCMBE 2023. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51455-5_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51455-5_16
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