Abstract
Due to the rapid anatomical changes that occur within the brain structure in early human development and the significant differences between infant brains and the widely used standard adult templates, it becomes increasingly important to utilize appropriate age- and population-specific average templates when analyzing infant neuroimaging data. In this study we created a new and highly detailed age-specific unbiased average head template in a standard MNI152-like infant coordinate system for healthy, typically developing 6-month-old infants by performing linear normalization, diffeomorphic normalization and iterative averaging processing on 60 subjects’ structural images. The resulting age-specific average templates in a standard MNI152-like infant coordinate system demonstrate sharper anatomical detail and clarity compared to existing infant average templates and successfully retains the average head size of the 6-month-old infant. An example usage of the average infant templates transforms magnetoencephalography (MEG) estimated activity locations from MEG’s subject-specific head coordinate space to the standard MNI152-like infant coordinate space. We also created a new atlas that reflects the true 6-month-old infant brain anatomy. Average templates and atlas are publicly available on our website (http://ilabs.washington.edu/6-m-templates-atlas).
Highlights
A common concern in infant neuroimaging analyses is spatial normalization of the infant brain structure and the problem of relating functional activations in the brain to a common reference frame
Creation of standard average pediatric brain templates is complicated by significant developmental variability in brain anatomy and morphometry within the infant and pediatric populations
Our average templates have successfully been created in the standard iMNI infant coordinate system proposed by Fonov et al [2]
Summary
A common concern in infant neuroimaging analyses is spatial normalization of the infant brain structure and the problem of relating functional activations in the brain to a common reference frame. By 12 months of age, the cerebrum, putamen, globus pallidus and cerebellar hemisphere reach up to ,70% of the volume of 7 to 11 year olds, whereas the hippocampus and amygdala only attain ,50% of the volume of 7 to 11 year olds, exemplifying that brain sub regions develop at different speeds [22]. Due to these dramatic developmental changes that occur on the scale of months during the first year, it is crucial to have truly age-specific reference templates when performing spatial normalization
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