This talk will provide a brief
introduction to recent developments in brain mapping and computational anatomy that have greatly expanded
our ability to analyze brain structure and function. The enormous diversity of
brain maps and imaging methods has spurred the development of population-based digital
brain atlases. These atlases store information on how the brain varies across age and
gender, across time, in health and disease, and in large human populations. We describe
how brain atlases, and the computational tools that align new datasets with
them, facilitate comparison of brain data across experiments, laboratories, and from different
imaging devices. The intent of the major methods are presented for the construction of
probabilistic atlases, which store information on anatomic and functional variability
in a population.