Regional volumetric abnormalities in pediatric autism revealed by structural magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract

Autism is a group of complex neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by impaired social interaction, restricted and repetitive behavior. We performed a large-scale retrospective analysis of 1,996 structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations of the brain from 1,769 autistic and neurologically typically developing patients (aged 0-32 years), and extracted regional volumetric measurements distributed across 463 brain regions of each patient. The youngest autistic patients (<2.5 years) were diagnosed after imaging and identified retrospectively. Our study demonstrates corpus callosum volumetric abnormalities among autistic patients that are associated with brain overgrowth in early childhood (0-5 years old), followed by a shift towards known decreased volumes in later ages. Results confirm known increases in ventricular volumes among autistic populations and extends those findings to increased volumes of the choroid plexus. Our study also demonstrates distributed volumetric abnormalities among autistic patients that affect a variety of key regional white and grey matter areas of the brain potentially associated with known symptoms of autism.

The Impact of Inhaled Ambient Ultrafine Particulate Matter on Developing Brain: Potential Importance of Elemental Contaminants

“…In contrast to postnatal CAPs, GE exposures increased rather than decreased CC size and myelination, effects that were still present at PND 57 to 61, the last time point available for examination. Increased CC size and myelination are actually seen early in the ASD brain, 62 followed only later by reductions in size and myelination, as seen with our CAPs exposures. 63,64 The findings produced by GE CAPs exposures to date confirm that AP-induced neurotoxicity is not unique to exposures carried out in Rochester, and despite the heterogeneity of AP compositions, similarities exist in their potential to disrupt white matter development in the central nervous system (CNS).…”

Structural magnetic resonance imaging demonstrates abnormal cortical thickness in Down syndrome: Newborns to young adults

“…Limitations of this study include that it was performed in a clinical environment with pulse sequence variability, though participants were imaged on a consistent set of MRI scanners at Boston Children's Hospital. Strengths and shortcomings of the approach taken in this study have been discussed previously in detail (Levman et al, 2017, 2018). It should be noted that the sample size for the DS group is low, especially in the 10–15 and 15–20 age groups, which have 15 and 9 participants with DS respectively.…”

Adaptive Independent Subspace Analysis of Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data

“…As a consequence, instead of the basic gradient of the multi-parameter and R in (8), the approximation Contrastive Divergence (CD) method facilitates to obtain the fast updating formulas given as: (9) here < •, • > Z jk is the is the expectation with k steps resampling Z jk under P(z j ; θ j ). Then w i , i ∈ S j should be optimized in sequence under the assumption of the subspace matrix H .…”

“…For simplicity, we also define X as the patches after reprocessing to maximize AISA model (8) and update the multiparameter r j , α j , w i (i ∈ S j ) via (9) and (10) with original learning rate µ = 0.15, adjustable parameter of learning rate τ = 4/5 and the maximum iteration γ = 800.…”

“…Currently, about 1 in 59 children has been diagnosed with ASD of some degree, which may include mild speech and language impairments, but also more debilitating symptoms such as intellectual impairment or cerebral palsy [8]. Accurate early diagnosis using the results of MRI data analysis [9], [10] and timely intervention, may tremendously improve the outcome [11].…”