Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 47, Supplement 1, July 2009, Page S102
NeuroImage

Unbiased nonlinear average age-appropriate brain templates from birth to adulthood

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-8119(09)70884-5Get rights and content

Introduction

Many automated MRI processing techniques depends on the use of a template brain (Mazziotta, Toga et al. 2001). However using the same template for the analysis of adult, pediatric and infant data is not ideal, since it may introduce a bias in analysis because a child's brain is not simply a smaller version of an adult brain (Im, Lee et al. 2008). Muzik et al. showed that when using an adult template with SPM96, the registration of pediatric data was more variable than the registration of adult data (Muzik, Chugani et al. 2000). We have created a set of brain templates for subjects aged from birth to the early adulthood (35 y.o), based on T1w, T2w and PDw MR imaging modalities with the goal of creating a uniform stereotaxic coordinate system, compatible with MNI152, commonly used in many research projects (Janke, Evans et al. 2006).

Section snippets

Data

This work is based on three cohorts from two projects: two pediatric databases of younger (n=118, age 0-4.5y, 1×1×3mm T1w) and older (n=350, age 5.4-18.5y, 1×1×1.5mm T1w) children enrolled in the NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development (Almli et al., 2007, (Evans and Group 2006), and a normal adult database (n=152 subjects, age 18-44y, 1×1×1mm T1w) from the ICBM project (Mazziotta, Toga et al. 2001).

Processing

All MRI data was transformed into the Talairach-like MNI stereotaxic space using minctracc

Results

Figures 1-4 show group averages for the whole age range. The age of subjects at Figures 1-2 is shown in months, and in Figures 3,4 in years. Templates for the younger children (0-60 m.o.) were scaled to represent the average head size at this age to improve the performance of automatic registration tools. The conversion to the MNI152 space may be achieved by applying the constant scaling factor after registration.

Conclusions

These atlases are publicly available at www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/atlases. They can be used to study human brain development and morphometric changes from birth to adulthood. The atlases can also be used as registration templates in a wide range of applications. Future work will generate create atlases for automatic brain region segmentation based on these templates.

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