Brain Microstructure assessed by CHARMED and NODDI in the newborn

DTI, may be the only feasible technique to study micorstructural changes occurring during the brain development. The main aims of this study was to design a complete new pipeline to perform micro-structural diffusion analysis in neonatal brain and to compare DTI to CHARMED and NODDI, which provides new microstructural metrics such as the intra-cellular volume fraction (nic) and the orientation dispersion index (ODI). High quality subject template was generated using DTI-TK tensor registration tools, which allows the accurate definitions of 13 ROIs. FA, nic and ODI were able to depict fine microstructural differences in early maturation fiber tracts.