Structural group analysis of cortical curvature and depth patterns in the developing brain

In the context of the study of brain morphogenesis, we present here a framework for surface-based group analysis using local cortical features in the neonate brain. We propose to detect and match local maxima from curvature and depth profiles of sulcal fundi. Such entities could have a key role to understand the variability of the brain morphology. We also describe a cortical localization tool dedicated to the developing brain. The proposed method is performed on a dataset of 25 preterm newborns and has detected consistent entities at the group level, both from cortical curvature and depth maps.