Age-Specific Average Head Template for Typically Developing 6-Month-Old Infants

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).