Dynamic Development of Regional Cortical Thickness and Surface Area in Early Childhood

Abstract

Cortical thickness (CT) and surface area (SA) are altered in many neuropsychiatric disorders and are correlated with cognitive functioning. Little is known about how these components of cortical gray matter develop in the first years of life. We studied the longitudinal development of regional CT and SA expansion in healthy infants from birth to 2 years. CT and SA have distinct and heterogeneous patterns of development that are exceptionally dynamic; overall CT increases by an average of 36.1%, while cortical SA increases 114.6%. By age 2, CT is on average 97% of adult values, compared with SA, which is 69%. This suggests that early identification, prevention, and intervention strategies for neuropsychiatric illness need to be targeted to this period of rapid postnatal brain development, and that SA expansion is the principal driving factor in cortical volume after 2 years of age.

Spatial Patterns, Longitudinal Development, and Hemispheric Asymmetries of Cortical Thickness in Infants from Birth to 2 Years of Age

“…The UNC hospitals recruited pregnant mothers during the second trimester of pregnancy, with the informed consents obtained from both parents. Exclusion criteria included abnormalities on fetal ultrasound, gestational age (GA) at birth Ͻ35 weeks, major medical or neurologic illness after birth, and major medical or psychotic illness in the mother Lyall et al, 2014). These subjects were part of large prospective longitudinal studies of early brain development in healthy children (Knickmeyer et al, 2008;.…”

“…Hence, CT has become an important macroscopic morphological measure of the cerebral cortex in MRI studies. Changes of CT are found in normal development, aging, and brain disorders, and may indicate differential underlying microstructural changes of the cortex in different states (Shaw et al, 2008;Lyall et al, 2014).…”

“…Many neurodevelopmental disorders may already exhibit abnormal development of CT during this early postnatal stage (Lyall et al, 2014). However, unlike adult MRI, infant T1-weighted and T2-weighted MRI exhibits extremely poor and dynamic tissue contrast during development, making CT measurement based on the tissue contrast of a single time point less reliable.…”

“…Greater understanding would provide fundamental insights into neurodevelopmental disorders. Recently, Lyall et al, 2014 first examined regional CT development in infants by parcellating the cortex into 76 gyral-level regions, and revealed heterogeneous growth patterns across regions. However, there still exists a significant knowledge gap on the spatially fine-scaled spatiotemporal patterns and hemispheric asymmetries of CT in infants.…”

LINKS: Learning-Based Multi-source IntegratioN FrameworK for Segmentation of Infant Brain Images

“…Accurate segmentation of infant brain MR images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in this critical phase is of great importance for studying the normal and abnormal early brain development Hanson et al, 2013;Li et al, 2014a;Li et al, 2013a;Li et al, 2014b;Li et al, 2013bLi et al, , 2014cLi et al, 2014d;Li et al, 2014e;Lyall et al, 2014;Nie et al, 2012;Nie et al, 2014;Verma et al, 2005). However, the segmentation of infant brain MRI is challenging due to the reduced tissue contrast (Weisenfeld and Warfield, 2009), increased noise, severe partial volume effect (Xue et al, 2007), and ongoing white matter myelination (Gui et al, 2012;Weisenfeld and Warfield, 2009).…”