Abstract
The trajectory of the developing brain is characterized by a sequence of complex, nonlinear patterns that occur at systematic stages of maturation. Although significant prior neuroimaging research has shed light on these patterns, the challenge of accurately characterizing brain maturation, and identifying areas of accelerated or delayed development, remains. Altered brain development, particularly during the earliest stages of life, is believed to be associated with many neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. In this work, we develop a framework to construct voxel-wise estimates of brain age based on magnetic resonance imaging measures sensitive to myelin content. 198 myelin water fraction (VFM) maps were acquired from healthy male and female infants and toddlers, 3 to 48 months of age, and used to train a sigmoidal-based maturational model. The validity of the approach was then established by testing the model on 129 different VFM datasets. Results revealed the approach to have high accuracy, with a mean absolute percent error of 13% in males and 14% in females, and high predictive ability, with correlation coefficients between estimated and true ages of 0.945 in males and 0.94 in females. This work represents a new approach toward mapping brain maturity, and may provide a more faithful staging of brain maturation in infants beyond chronological or gestation-corrected age, allowing earlier identification of atypical regional brain development. Hum Brain Mapp 36:1233–1244, 2015. © 2015 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Highlights
Brain maturation encompasses a variety of structural and functional processes that respond dynamically and interdependently to learning, environment, and genetic influences.Axonal pruning, dendritic sprouting, synapse generation, and myelination begin at various stages of fetal development and continue post-natally through to adulthood [Sowell et al, 2003; Toga et al, 2006]
MRI data used in this study was acquired as part of a much larger, ongoing longitudinal study investigating white matter maturation [Deoni et al, 2012] and while a subset of the subject datasets have been previously used in the analysis performed in prior publications [Dean et al 2014a,b; Deoni et al 2012; O’Muircheartaigh et al, 2013, 2014], the analytic methods, results, and conclusions have not been previously reported in these prior publications
To illustrate the nonlinear development of VFM during the investigated age range, representative developmental trajectories with the corresponding fitted Gompertz function for the corpus callosum, frontal white matter, and optic radiations are shown in the top row of Figure 1
Summary
Brain maturation encompasses a variety of structural and functional processes that respond dynamically and interdependently to learning, environment, and genetic influences.Axonal pruning, dendritic sprouting, synapse generation, and myelination begin at various stages of fetal development and continue post-natally through to adulthood [Sowell et al, 2003; Toga et al, 2006].
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