title: Towards the "baby connectome": mapping the structural connectivity of the newborn brain.
abstract: Defining the structural and functional connectivity of the human brain (the human "connectome") is a basic challenge in neuroscience. Recently, techniques for noninvasively characterizing structural connectivity networks in the adult brain have been developed using diffusion and high-resolution anatomic MRI. The purpose of this study was to establish a framework for assessing structural connectivity in the newborn brain at any stage of development and to show how network properties can be derived in a clinical cohort of six-month old infants sustaining perinatal hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). Two different anatomically unconstrained parcellation schemes were proposed and the resulting network metrics were correlated with neurological outcome at 6 months. Elimination and correction of unreliable data, automated parcellation of the cortical surface, and assembling the large-scale baby connectome allowed an unbiased study of the network properties of the newborn brain using graph theoretic analysis. In the application to infants with HIE, a trend to declining brain network integration and segregation was observed with increasing neuromotor deficit scores.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America. olga.tymofiyeva@ucsf.edu
authors.forename: Olga
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Tymofiyeva
authors.forename: Christopher P
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Hess
authors.forename: Etay
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ziv
authors.forename: Nan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Tian
authors.forename: Sonia L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Bonifacio
authors.forename: Patrick S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: McQuillen
authors.forename: Donna M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Ferriero
authors.forename: A James
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Barkovich
authors.forename: Duan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D020925:Hypoxia-Ischemia, Brain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D007223:Infant; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009434:Neural Pathways