  It is critical to quantitatively analyse the developing human fetal brain in
order to fully understand neurodevelopment in both normal fetuses and those
with congenital disorders. To facilitate this analysis, automatic multi-tissue
fetal brain segmentation algorithms are needed, which in turn requires open
databases of segmented fetal brains. Here we introduce a publicly available
database of 50 manually segmented pathological and non-pathological fetal
magnetic resonance brain volume reconstructions across a range of gestational
ages (20 to 33 weeks) into 7 different tissue categories (external
cerebrospinal fluid, grey matter, white matter, ventricles, cerebellum, deep
grey matter, brainstem/spinal cord). In addition, we quantitatively evaluate
the accuracy of several automatic multi-tissue segmentation algorithms of the
developing human fetal brain. Four research groups participated, submitting a
total of 10 algorithms, demonstrating the benefits the database for the
development of automatic algorithms.
