Figure 3.

Quantification of ventricular wall cardiac fibers during gestation. (A) The fractional anisotropy (FA) of the computed cardiac fibers, derived from tractography performed on DT-MRI datasets, was found to significantly increase with gestational age (p = 0.0009, R² = 0.41). (B) Apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) was also found to be significantly correlated with age (p = 0.0196, R² = 0.23). To further identify the extend of these changes, we investigated diffusions in the primary (C) and tertiary (D) orientation. We found that only the radial diffusion (RD; D) was significantly correlated with gestation (p = 0.011, R² = 0.27).