Abstract #3425

Construction of a DTI Atlas of the Healthy Human Brain with Diffusion Full Tensor Information in ICBM-81 Space: An Application for Studying the Maturation of White Matter

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.