Development of Microstructural and Morphological Cortical Profiles in the Neonatal Brain

Abstract

In the perinatal brain, regional cortical architecture and connectivity lay the foundations for functional circuits and emerging behaviour. Interruptions or atypical development during or before this period may therefore have long-lasting consequences. However, to be able to investigate these deviations, we need a measure of how this architecture evolves in the typically developing brain.To this end, in a large cohort of 241 term-born infants we used Magnetic Resonance Imaging to estimate cortical profiles based on morphometry and microstructure over the perinatal period (37-44 weeks post-menstrual age, PMA). Using the covariance of these profiles as a measure of interareal network similarity (Morphometric Similarity Networks; MSN), we clustered these networks into distinct modules. The resulting modules were consistent and symmetric, and corresponded to known functional distinctions, including sensory-motor, limbic and association regions and were spatially mapped onto known cytoarchitectonic tissue classes. Posterior (parietal, occipital) regions became more morphometrically similar with increasing PMA, while peri-cingulate and medial temporal regions became more dissimilar. Network strength was associated with PMA:Within-network similarity increased over PMA suggesting emerging network distinction. These changes in cortical network architecture over an eight-week period are consistent with, and likely underpin, the highly dynamic behavioural and cognitive development occurring during this critical period. The resulting cortical profiles might provide normative reference to investigate atypical early brain development.

Development of visual cortex in human neonates are selectively modified by postnatal experience

“…Similar to the previous findings in human infants (Bozek et al, 2018;Fenchel et al, 2020), both the CT and CM in ventral cortex increased between 37 and 44 weeks of PMA in our study. We went one step to investigate the different mechanism underlying these trends, and found the development of CT was considerably modulated by the postnatal experience while the CM was heavily influenced by prenatal duration.…”

“…Previous studies have described the developmental trajectory of CT and myelination in human infants, and found a general increasing tread for both two measurements with PMA in whole brain (Bozek et al, 2018;Fenchel et al, 2020). But the contribution of postnatal experience to the development were not clarified because PMA reflects both prenatal endogenous effect and postnatal experience.…”

Peak Width of Skeletonized Water Diffusion MRI in the Neonatal Brain

“…They have revealed new insights into cortical maturation in perinatal life, and identified dysmaturation in newborns with congenital heart disease (59,60). Recently, the tensor derived and NODDI metrics have been used together in integrated approaches, such as morphometric similarity networks (12,61), but to our knowledge, this is the first time that DTI and NODDI metrics have been used within the peak width skeletonized framework for studying the developing brain.…”

Early structural connectivity within the sensorimotor network: deviations related to prematurity and association to neurodevelopmental outcome

“…In particular, although potentially sub- optimal, we opted for default settings of diffusivities, which were optimized for the adult WM but not for infants (Guerrero et al, 2019). In the absence of gold standards for infant-specific NODDI fitting to evaluate the metric maps, this was performed to maintain some consistency with previous studies (Guerrero et al, 2019; Fenchel et al, 2020).…”