"The advent of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology has brought us closer to understanding brain function in health and disease. With 7 Teslas high field MRI machines, pioneers of imaging physics have made possible in-vivo examination of the human brain at sub-millimetre scale. New imaging contrasts additionally offer rich information regarding tissue organization and composition. While many tools have been developed over the years to process automatically more conventional MRI, currently these new images are largely inspected and annotated by hand. The purpose of this proposal is to develop at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, a center with leading expertise in 7 Teslas MRI and fMRI, a series of innovative tools for automated brain image analysis. The incoming researcher, Dr. Pierre-Louis Bazin, has extensive experience in developing innovative, state-of-the-art image segmentation and analysis tools for brain MR images at 3 Teslas, including fundamental and specialized methods for brain extraction, tissue and structure segmentation, cortical reconstruction, white matter labelling and thalamic parcellation in diffusion-weighted imaging. Many of these tools have been successfully employed in large scale studies of normal aging, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and small vessel cardiovascular disease at the Johns Hopkins University and have the potential to translate well to meet the new challenges of ultra-high resolution MRI at 7 Teslas."