Abstract
Defining the structural and functional connectivity of the human brain (the human “connectome”) is a basic challenge in neuroscience. Recently, techniques for noninvasively characterizing structural connectivity networks in the adult brain have been developed using diffusion and high-resolution anatomic MRI. The purpose of this study was to establish a framework for assessing structural connectivity in the newborn brain at any stage of development and to show how network properties can be derived in a clinical cohort of six-month old infants sustaining perinatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). Two different anatomically unconstrained parcellation schemes were proposed and the resulting network metrics were correlated with neurological outcome at 6 months. Elimination and correction of unreliable data, automated parcellation of the cortical surface, and assembling the large-scale baby connectome allowed an unbiased study of the network properties of the newborn brain using graph theoretic analysis. In the application to infants with HIE, a trend to declining brain network integration and segregation was observed with increasing neuromotor deficit scores.
Highlights
During brain maturation, structural and functional pathways are formed and reshaped in cases of prenatal, perinatal or early childhood brain injury
The babies were scanned on a General Electric 3T EXCITE MR scanner using half-Fourier spin-echo (SE) echo planar imaging (EPI) diffusion sequence with a field of view (FOV) of 24 cm624 cm, 726128 matrix reconstructed to 1286128 and zero-filled to 2566256, TE = 57 ms, TR = 9 s, 30 directions distributed by electrostatic repulsion [14], b-value = 700 s/mm2, with a parallel imaging ASSET (Array Spatial Sensitivity Encoding Technique) acceleration factor of 2
Artifacts in sedated babies were caused by mechanical vibrations of the MRI table, as well as movement caused by the mechanical ventilator used during anesthesia
Summary
Structural and functional pathways are formed and reshaped in cases of prenatal, perinatal or early childhood brain injury. Studies in the adult brain [2,3,4] have attempted to provide a more complete description of the brain’s structural connectivity by assembling the ‘‘connectome,’’ a term introduced by Sporns et al [5] in analogy to the human genome. In these recent studies, the analysis included single tracks and regions-of-interest (ROIs) and the whole brain structural network topology, as assessed at the scale possible using diffusion MRI techniques. Studying the human connectome using network science offers a unique opportunity to better understand inter-individual differences in neural connectivity
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