Chinese Color Nest Project : An accelerated longitudinal brain-mind cohort

Abstract

The ongoing Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP) was established to create normative charts for brain structure and function across the human lifespan, and link age-related changes in brain imaging measures to psychological assessments of behavior, cognition, and emotion using an accelerated longitudinal design. In the initial stage, CCNP aims to recruit 1520 healthy individuals (6–90 years), which comprises three phases: developing (devCCNP: 6–18 years, N = 480), maturing (matCCNP: 20–60 years, N = 560) and aging (ageCCNP: 60–84 years, N = 480). In this paper, we present an overview of the devCCNP, including study design, participants, data collection and preliminary findings. The devCCNP has acquired data with three repeated measurements from 2013 to 2017 in Southwest University, Chongqing, China (CCNP-SWU, N = 201). It has been accumulating baseline data since July 2018 and the second wave data since September 2020 in Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China (CCNP-CAS, N = 168). Each participant in devCCNP was followed up for 2.5 years at 1.25-year intervals. The devCCNP obtained longitudinal neuroimaging, biophysical, social, behavioral and cognitive data via MRI, parent- and self-reported questionnaires, behavioral assessments, and computer tasks. Additionally, data were collected on children’s learning, daily life and emotional states during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. We address data harmonization across the two sites and demonstrated its promise of characterizing the growth curves for the overall brain morphometry using multi-center longitudinal data. CCNP data will be shared via the National Science Data Bank and requests for further information on collaboration and data sharing are encouraged.

Charting the human amygdala development across childhood and adolescence: Manual and automatic segmentation

“…Our work provides not only a practical guideline for future studies on amygdala in children and adolescents but also its growth standard resources for translational and educational applications. This can be implemented with normative modeling ( Holla et al, 2020 , Marquand et al, 2016 , Liu et al, 2021 ) for individualized assessments on typical or atypical development as well as their associations with behavioral performance, school achievement and clinical symptoms.…”

“…The sample described in this study was part of an accelerated longitudinal database, namely the Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP: http://deepneuro.bnu.edu.cn/?p=163 ) for developmental brain–mind association studies across different stages of the postnatal lifespan ( Zuo et al, 2017 , Liu et al, 2021 ). Such acceleration was implemented by combining cross-sectional and longitudinal design to achieve long-time follow-up studies, such as lifespan development cohorts ( Nooner et al, 2012 , Thompson et al, 2011 ).…”

Neuroimaging brain growth charts: A road to mental health

“…Therefore, it is important for developmental neuroscientists to recruit representative participants and gather data from them repeatedly over an extended period when constructing growth charts, including brain growth charts. Several large-scale and multi-modal neuroimaging cohorts that are suitable for the construction of brain growth charts have been built (Volkow et al ., 2018 ; Liu et al ., 2021 ), table 1 reflects a non-exhaustive list of typical brain development cohorts from prenatal to young adults. These cohorts cover a diverse set of healthy individuals and reflect important contributions for the construction of brain growth charts, explorations of developmental underpinnings, as well as genetic and environmental factors that may influence health across the lifespan.…”

“…Advances in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provide opportunities to safely measure and map the structure and functional networks of human brain. Leveraging this approach, developmental neuroscientists have recently begun to establish brain growth charts (Dong et al ., 2020 ), seeking to generate normative development curves across the lifespan (Ziegler et al ., 2014 ; Marquand et al ., 2016 ; Zuo et al ., 2017 ; Reardon et al ., 2018 ; Nobis et al ., 2019 ; Bethlehem et al ., 2021 ; Rutherford et al ., 2021 ; Liu et al ., 2021 ).…”

“…A growth chart is also a ‘road to health’. The centered brain growth chart is developed based on the Chinese Color Nest Project cohort (Liu et al ., 2021 ), consisting of a series of seven centile curves (98%, 90%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 10%, 2%) of brain volume for Chinese Han girls from childhood to adolescence (5–18 years old). Individual brain volume measurements can be expressed as centiles by plotting them on the chart.…”