BABY STEPS

There have been releases of high quality, large sample and open access studies of the neonatal and infant brain (exemplified in studies such as the developing and baby Human Connectome Projects). This focus is due to the importance of this early life period on later developmental outcome. Analysing these new datasets is extremely challenging, the brain develops extremely rapidly over the perinatal period and much more than any other time in postnatal life... This development affects obvious factors like brain and structure volume, but also image intensity and local shape. This presents challenges in image processing and image statistics, potentially reducing sensitivity to real relationships between imaging and outcome. Standard neuroimaging pipelines, tailored for child or adult populations, do not easily work with these data. Developmental trajectories over short periods of life (weeks to months) are large highly non-linear so typical statistical approaches are imprecise or, in many..