I am using AFNI to analyze MRIs on a wide range of children, ranging from a few months old to 13 years old. My colleagues and I have been using an adult template, but are discussing switching to a different template. We’ve used the Haskins pediatric template a few times now, but many of our scans are done on children younger than 7, and we plan to study them longitudinally over up to 5 years. My colleague wants to ideally use as few templates as possible, to make comparison easier. Has anyone else had this conundrum? What does the hive mind suggest for a good template?
Neonates and infants should likely have a different reference template—often their scans have different contrasts/properties, even in structural imaging.
For children, say, 4-5 and older, the Haskins might be the closest available, and also will become increasingly age-matched over the duration of your scanning, as well. It would also help with consistency over much of the age span.
–pt
Thanks, I’ll pass this on to my colleague. Do you have any suggestions for templates for infants and children younger than 4?
Aye, there’s the rub. Some available ones have artificial brightness patterns and things.
I might try out these MNI McGill infant templates:
https://nist.mni.mcgill.ca/infant-atlases-0-4-5-years/
to start. I am a little surprised they are not sharper/crisper. The package name is a bit confusing, I think, since they don’t have reference atlases (= ROI maps) associated with them, which might also be slightly difficult for analysis.
NB: when downloading the zipped dir of NIFTIs, note that they just unpack into your current working directory, not into a subdirectory of the basename of the zipped archive. Grumble.
–pt