Age-Specific Cerebral Vessel Templates Across the Lifespan of Healthy Adults

Cerebral vasculature plays a critical role in brain function. Accurate characterization of its normative organization and distribution is essential for identifying vascular abnormalities. However, existing cerebrovascular templates do not adequately account for age-related anatomical variability and typically rely on structural-image-driven registration without explicitly leveraging vascular information for alignment. To address these limitations, we present a set of open, age-specific cerebrovascular templates constructed from time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography (TOF-MRA) data of 1,288 healthy adults spanning the adult lifespan (19-92 years). Fine-scale vascular structures were automatically segmented using CereVessPro and registered through a novel two-stage framework that integrates age-specific structural alignment with vessel-guided refinement. The resulting resources comprise a series of openly accessible maps, including age-specific MRA templates, vessel probability maps, vessel density maps, and vessel radius maps from young to older adulthood. This framework is designed to improve vascular correspondence across subjects by explicitly addressing age-dependent anatomical differences and incorporating vascular features during alignment. Validation analyses revealed biologically plausible age-related changes in vascular morphology and vessel calibre, particularly in major cerebral arteries. Together, these data provide an age-resolved reference for cerebrovascular mapping, improving vascular alignment and supporting more reliable group-level analyses. This resource may facilitate more sensitive detection of vascular abnormalities in both research and clinical contexts.