Imaging the rapidly developing brain: Current challenges for MRI studies in the first five years of life

Abstract

Rapid and widespread changes in brain anatomy and physiology in the first five years of life present substantial challenges for developmental structural, functional, and diffusion MRI studies. One persistent challenge is that methods best suited to earlier developmental stages are suboptimal for later stages, which engenders a trade-off between using different, but age-appropriate, methods for different developmental stages or identical methods across stages. Both options have potential benefits, but also biases, as pipelines for each developmental stage can be matched on methods or the age-appropriateness of methods, but not both. This review describes the data acquisition, processing, and analysis challenges that introduce these potential biases and attempts to elucidate decisions and make recommendations that would optimize developmental comparisons.

White matter in infancy is prospectively associated with language outcomes in kindergarten

“…On another note, selected measures utilized to characterize language abilities at school age are non-exhaustive in providing a first indicator of these longitudinal relationships among a subset of language constructs; further investigation will be necessary to examine white matter in relation to additional facets of language, particularly in expressive domains such as sentence formulation. In addition, recognizing the constraints of our current approach to white matter tractography in infancy that necessitated both participant and tract-specific quality control procedures, methodological advancement of infant neuroimaging analysis continues to be needed in future work to optimize tract definition and reconstruction within the first two years of life ( Turesky et al, 2021 ). That said, the medium-to-large effect sizes associated with significant effects presently identified suggest that, despite necessary exclusions due to careful quality control, the present sample size was sufficient to capture the magnitude of potential effects.…”

“…For each tract, the characterization of 100 nodes was resampled to 50 nodes, thereby discarding the portion of the tract where individual fibers separate from the core fascicle toward their cortical destination, capturing the core of the tract. While there are currently several approaches to characterization of FA within white matter tracts (for a detailed methodological review, see Turesky et al, 2021 ), the present analysis examined FA within 50 nodes along the trajectory of each tract, modeling one approach previously employed in closely related literature (Langer et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2016 ), since it is known to improve normalization and co-registration of each tract for group comparisons ( Yeatman et al, 2012a ). For the AF, resampling of nodes was furthermore employed utilizing an alignment approach previously established in the AFQ literature ( Yeatman et al, 2012a ; Langer et al, 2017).…”

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

“…One alternative explanation for the smaller number of events in visual regions could be model bias, for example if the model defaults to fewer events in heterogeneous participant groups. Although the Aeronaut dataset had a narrower age band (all participants were under 12 months old), there are still dramatic cognitive and neural changes during the first year of life (Turesky et al, 2021). We found some evidence of developmental differences in how well adult event structure fit infant LOC, but no other regions showed age-dependent changes.…”

Role of diffusion kurtosis imaging for detecting brain microstructural changes in complete remission childhood survivors undergoing chemotherapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia

“…A paired-sample t-test was used to compare the DKI parameters between patients before and after induction. After that, the case group was accordingly divided by age into a ≤ 5-year-old group(10 patients) and > 5-year-old group(10 patients) [14,15], the low-risk and middle-risk groups were compared to see whether there were any differences between the two groups before chemotherapy and after CR in terms of DKI parameters.…”