title: Changes of MR and DTI appearance in early human brain development.
abstract: Understanding myelination in early brain development is of clinical importance, as many neurological disorders have their origin in early cerebral organization and maturation. The goal of this work is to study a large neonate database acquired with standard MR imagery to illuminate effects of early development in MRI. 90 neonates were selected from a study of healthy brain development. Subjects were imaged via MRI postnatally. MR acquisition included high-resolution structural and diffusion tensor images. Unbiased atlases for structural and DTI data were generated and co-registered into a single coordinate frame for voxel-wise comparison of MR and DTI appearance across time. All original datasets were mapped into this frame and structural image data was additionally intensity normalized. In addition, myelinated white matter probabilistic segmentations from our neonate tissue segmentation were mapped into the same space to study how our segmentation results were affected by the changing intensity characteristics in early development Linear regression maps and p-value maps were computed and visualized. The resulting visualization of voxels-wise corresponding maps of all MR and DTI properties captures early development information in MR imagery. Surprisingly, we encountered regions of seemingly decreased myelinated WM probability over time even though we expected a confident increase for all of the brain. The intensity changes in the MR images in those regions help explain this counterintuitive result. The regressional results indicate that this is an effect of intensity changes due not solely to myelination processes but also likely brain dehydration processes in early postnatal development.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC, USA.
authors.forename: Cassian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Marc
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC, USA.
authors.forename: Clement
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Vachet
authors.affiliation: Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
authors.forename: Guido
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gerig
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC, USA.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Blocher
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC, USA.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gilmore
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC, USA ; Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC, USA.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Styner