Mapping developmental regionalization and patterns of cortical surface area from 29 post-menstrual weeks to 2 years of age.-猫眼课题宝

DOI：

10.1073/pnas.2121748119

发表时间：

2022-08-16

期刊：

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

影响因子：

11.1

通讯作者：

中科院分区：

综合性期刊1区

文献类型：

作者：

来源链接：

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9388141/

Perinatal and early postnatal development of cortical surface area is essential for establishing cognitive abilities and behaviors that could impact an entire lifetime. Investigating the developmental regionalization and patterns of cortical surface area during this critical age can advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of normal brain development. Thus, we unprecedently leveraged >1,000 infant MRI scans from two large-scale infant neuroimaging datasets, which seamlessly cover both perinatal and postnatal periods, and discovered the developmentally distinct cortical parcels that correspond well to structurally or functionally meaningful regions. Moreover, an obvious central-pole separation with high-order association cortices undergoing more dramatic expansion than central regions was also unveiled. The results greatly compensate for the deficiencies of the previous knowledge of early cortical development. Surface area of the human cerebral cortex expands extremely dynamically and regionally heterogeneously from the third trimester of pregnancy to 2 y of age, reflecting the spatial heterogeneity of the underlying microstructural and functional development of the cerebral cortex. However, little is known about the developmental patterns and regionalization of cortical surface area during this critical stage, due to the lack of high-quality imaging data and accurate computational tools for pediatric brain MRI data. To fill this critical knowledge gap, by leveraging 1,037 high-quality MRI scans with the age between 29 post-menstrual weeks and 24 mo from 735 pediatric subjects in two complementary datasets, i.e., the Baby Connectome Project (BCP) and the developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), and state-of-the-art dedicated image-processing tools, we unprecedentedly parcellate the cerebral cortex into a set of distinct subdivisions purely according to the developmental patterns of the cortical surface. Our discovered developmentally distinct subdivisions correspond well to structurally and functionally meaningful regions and reveal spatially contiguous, hierarchical, and bilaterally symmetric patterns of early cortical surface expansion. We also show that high-order association subdivisions, where cortical folds emerge later during prenatal stages, undergo more dramatic cortical surface expansion during infancy, compared with the central regions, especially the sensorimotor and insula cortices, thus forming a distinct central-pole division in early cortical surface expansion. These results provide an important reference for exploring and understanding dynamic early brain development in health and disease.