Judith Verhoeven1, Caroline A. Sage2, Sabine Deprez2, Paul De Cock1, Lieven Lagae1, Alexander Leemans3, Wim Van Hecke4, Stefan Sunaert2
1Pediatrics, University Hospitals of the Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 2Radiology, University Hospitals of the Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 3Cubric, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK; 4Vision Lab, University of Antwerp, Wilrijk, Belgium
The availability of an appropriate diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) template and normative DTI data is essential for the interpretation of pathological white matter (WM) findings. In this work, we introduce a population-averaged DTI atlas that contains the complete diffusion information, which allows fiber tractography on the DTI atlas. The tract reconstructions from this DTI atlas can be used as tract masks for semi-automated ROI analyses on individual DTI datasets that have been warped to the DTI atlas. To validate this method, we assessed WM maturation and asymmetry of children aged 4 months to 18 years using these tract masks.