About
Improvements of fetal diagnosis allow now addressing complex diseases through multimodal procedures. However, there are known limitations to what can be accurately diagnosed from ultrasound and complementary invasive tests may have side effects. Complementary use of fetal MRI has brought hope of massively improving fetal/mother healthcare by improving diagnostic and management pathways. LUMIERE is the leading imaging research platform in France to improve fetal diagnosis and therapy with dedicated imaging devices including a 1.5 T MRI.
Our project aims at exploring fetal morphological chatacteristics as a key to prenatal diagnosis: Indeed, postnatally, geneticists can make a diagnosis by looking at morphological features, unfortunately this cannot be achieved prenatally due to poor rendering of the full fetal morphology. Actually, ultrasound is not enough standardized and technical limitations to obtain the reconstructed face hamper the diagnosis capabilities
Example of MRI images of foetus visualised using the DIVA software (https://diva.pasteur.fr).