Construction of a 4D atlas of the developing brain using non-rigid registration

In this paper we present an approach for constructing a 4D brain atlas of MR images of preterm baby infants aged between 26-44 weeks of gestation at time of scan. The method used for the creation of an average 4D atlas is based on the use of pair-wise non-rigid registration to eliminate bias in the atlas towards any of the original images. In addition, we use kernel regression to produce age-dependent anatomical templates. The resulting unbiased 4D atlas is much sharper than currently available atlases created using affine registration.