Project description
Advancing care for vulnerable newborns
One in four babies worldwide arrives too early or too small, often due to maternal malnutrition or infections. These small vulnerable newborns face high risks of impaired brain development, with consequences that can last a lifetime. The ERC-funded WOMB2COT project uses ultrasound, deep learning, and computational neuroanatomy to track newborn brain growth in unprecedented detail. Using scans from neonatal intensive care units, the project will track brain development against expected in-womb growth, reduce imaging artefacts, and measure the brain with high precision. Built for affordable, bedside use, WOMB2COT aims to improve diagnosis and care where newborns face the greatest risks.
Objective
Over 25% of infants worldwide are born too soon and/or too small due to adverse exposures during pregnancy, such as maternal malnutrition and infections. Such exposures can also disrupt the maturation of the fetal brain, which is rapidly developing during pregnancy and the first year of life. Hence, these small vulnerable newborns (SVNs), if they survive, are at high risk of poor neurodevelopmental outcomes in later life.
Monitoring anatomical growth is key to optimising and determining SVN care pathways, especially in the first days after birth. Ultrasound (US) enables non-invasive imaging of fetal and neonatal brain anatomy, but growth assessments are based on coarse metrics (e.g. head circumference), with pre- and post-birth measurements rarely integrated.
WOMB2COT will tackle these hurdles with a technically ambitious programme that combines US imaging with deep learning (DL) and computational neuroanatomy. We will develop advanced DL-based US image analysis techniques, including neural radiance fields, image registration, and domain adaptation, to quantify brain development in the most vulnerable preterm infants compared to their expected in utero growth trajectory. This approach will utilise longitudinal cUS scans collected in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), offering a more detailed, objective evaluation of neonatal brain growth and bridging the care gap as these infants transition from intra- to extra-uterine life.
We aim to reduce US imaging artefacts (e.g. acoustic shadows) and enhance structural specificity to sub-millimetre resolution to extract brain morphometrics (BMs), surpassing coarse and qualitative assessments. Building on our population atlas of healthy brain maturation (Nature 2023) and advanced computational tools, we will compare SVN growth with age-matched healthy fetuses. To maximise its diagnostic utility, WOMB2COT will be developed for low-cost, point-of-care US equipment, benefiting regions with the highest SVN burden.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences basic medicine anatomy and morphology
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine critical care medicine
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine obstetrics
- natural sciences computer and information sciences artificial intelligence machine learning deep learning
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine embryology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom
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