Fig 2. MRI processing.

T1 images are registered to the neonatal UNC Infant 012 Atlas and visually inspected for motion degradation. An automated rejection algorithm inspects and eliminates corrupted directions of DTI imaging, and deterministic tractography is performed to create white matter tracts. The connectome, a weighted undirected adjacency matrix between each of the 90 cerebral regions of interests (ROIs) is created, with average fractional anisotropy (FA) along the connecting tracts used as weights. Connection patterns are described using global graph theory metrics and individual tract connectivity is assessed.