The influence of preterm birth on the developing thalamocortical connectome

Ball, Gareth; Boardman, James P.; Aljabar, Paul; Pandit, Anand; Arichi, Tomoki; Merchant, Nazakat; Rueckert, Daniel; Edwards, A. David; Counsell, Serena J.

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2012.07.006

Cited by 216 publications

(247 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…However, alterations in the global framework of brain wiring have not been observed and are unlikely in the absence of major brain lesions (Bütefisch, 2004). The adverse effects of preterm birth have predominantly been noted to affect the quality of connections rather than their overall layout (Ball et al, , 2013Doria et al, 2010a;Scheinost et al, 2015;Smyser et al, 2010;Toulmin et al, 2015).…”

Section: Postnatal Brain Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both structural (Ball et al, , 2013 and functional deficits (Doria et al, 2010a;Smyser et al, 2010;Toulmin et al, 2015) have been reported. Disturbances in structural connectivity were revealed to be most widespread, involving thalamocortical connections distributed across frontal, temporal, occipital and parietal lobes (Ball et al, , 2013. Complementing these findings, reduced structural connectivity between the thalamus and extensive cortical regions as measured at term equivalent age was found to be related to poorer cognitive performance at age two years in 57 preterm born children .…”

Section: Preterm Birthmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The emergence of functional architecture during early brain development

2017

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Early human brain development constitutes a sequence of intricate processes resulting in the ontogeny of functionally operative neural circuits. Developmental trajectories of early brain network formation are genetically programmed and can be modified by epigenetic and environmental influences. Such alterations may exert profound effects on neurodevelopment, potentially persisting throughout the lifespan. This review focuses on the critical period of fetal and early postnatal brain development. Here we collate findings from neuroimaging studies, with a particular focus on functional MRI research that interrogated early brain network development in both health and high-risk or disease states. First, we will provide an overview of the developmental processes that take place from the embryonic period through early infancy in order to contextualize brain network formation. Second, functional brain network development in the typically developing brain will be discussed. Third, we will touch on prenatal and perinatal risk factors that may interfere with the trajectories of functional brain wiring, including prenatal substance exposure, maternal mental illness and preterm

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Section: Postnatal Brain Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Preterm Birthmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of functional architecture during early brain development

2017

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“…The connectome network is then weighted by assigning a weight w(e k ij ) to each edge e k ij corresponding to the amount of structural connectivity between the two regions. This connectome weighting usually takes one of two forms: we can assign an edge weight based on the raw number of streamlines between regions (i.e., w(e k ij ) = c k ij ), or we can examine tract "integrity" by using the mean FA computed over the c k ij streamlines as an edge weight [3]. We will examine both weighting schemes and refer to their networks as tract-count and mean-FA connectomes respectively.…”

Section: Connectome Mappingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some other recent works have focused on the examination of the structural connectome of young infants by performing tractography between numerous anatomical regions in the brain [3,41,50,52,53,58,54]. Takahashi et al examined results of full-brain tractography qualitatively and described trends across postmortem infants between 17 and 40 weeks [50].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to quantify and organize tractography results, many studies abstract the connections in the brain as a network, where nodes typically represent anatomical regions and edges represent some measure of connectivity between those regions. Ball et al examined connections in the thalamocortical network of preterm infants and showed that early birth correlated with reduced connectivity [3]. Pandit et al studied the change in connection strengths across scan age and birth age on a cohort of preterm infants scanned as early as 47 weeks post-conception [41].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Structural network analysis of brain development in young preterm neonates

et al. 2014

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Preterm infants develop differently than those born at term and are at higher risk of brain pathology. Thus, an understanding of their development is of particular importance. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of preterm infants offers a window into brain development at a very early age, an age at which that development is not yet fully understood. Recent works have used DTI to analyze structural connectome of the brain scans using network analysis. These studies have shown that, even from infancy, the brain exhibits small-world properties. Here we examine a cohort of 47 normal preterm neonates (i.e., without brain injury and with normal neurodevelopment at 18 months of age) scanned between 27 and 45 weeks post-menstrual age to further the understanding of how the structural connectome develops. We use fullbrain tractography to find white matter tracts between the 90 cortical and sub-cortical regions defined in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill neonatal atlas. We then analyze the resulting connectomes and explore the differences between weighting edges by tract count versus fractional anisotropy. We observe that the brain networks in preterm infants, much like infants born at term, show high efficiency and clustering measures across a range of network scales. Further, the development of many individual region-pair connections, particularly in the frontal and occipital lobes, is significantly correlated with age. Finally, we observe that the preterm infant connectome remains highly efficient yet becomes more clustered across this age range, leading to a significant increase in its small-world structure.

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