Concretely, we will develop a DTI-atlas for the premature brain (0 to 4 year) by combining non-affine registration

techniques and new denoising algorithms for DWI-data as well as accounting for different growing speeds

of the premature brain. Nowadays, DWI is also seen as one of the fastest growing modalities for preterm brain

analysis. To do so we can build on the complementary expertise on (i) both registration and atlas building at the

Vision Lab (UA) (ii) medical image restauration at the Image Processing and Interpretation Group (Ghent University)

(iii) image processing specifically aimed at DWI and DTI (Image Sciences Institute, Utrecht, the Netherlands).

The main challenges of this research are related to the specificities concerning the premature brain being

mainly: the low signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements and the high variability of tissue parameters. On

the one hand we will investigate the quality improvement of the measured image data and the computed tensor

data, on the other hand we will investigate the actual atlas building where image registration plays a key role.