Analysis of Growth in the Developing Brain Using Non-Rigid Registration

This work describes and compares two different methods for identifying growth patterns in preterm infants during the second year of development. One method is based on creating anatomical atlases from the population of subjects within each timepoint and using the transformation between atlases at different timepoints to create average volume change maps. The second method uses multiple longitudinal intra-subject registrations to produce individual volume change maps. These maps are then transformed into a common coordinate system and averaged with the method used for atlas creation. We show that there is a reasonable level of agreement between the two methods and both generate plausible growth patterns implying that either could be used to track development during this period of growth.