IMAGING BRAIN MATURATION AND NEUROBEHAVIORAL CORRELATES

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The primary objectives of this proposal are to localized and stage structural maturational brain changes between childhood and adolescence using structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), and to relate these brain changes to improving cognitive abilities assessed with cognitive psychological tests of learning and memory and functioning MRI (fMRI). Neurodevelopment in normal children and adolescents is not yet well understood, but the few studies in the literature that have focused on this topic have shown regionally specific age-related changes in brain morphology. These maturational changes are characterized by great variability between individuals, even within narrow chronological age ranges. Such variability is also found in normative studies of improving cognitive abilities, and correlations have been found between cognitive measures and some brain measures. Notably, these relationships do not tend to be mediated by age, suggesting that maturational factors that are not well indexed by chronological age are involved with the plasticity in brain structure and its neurobehavioral correlates. The increased understanding of normal brain development obtained through this proposed program of research will be useful in scientific endeavors to understand aberrant brain maturation and cognitive impairments in children with various neurodevelopmental disorders, understand aberrant brain maturation and cognitive impairments in children with various neurodevelopmental disorders. This proposal details a plan for didactic study, enabling the candidate to acquire new skills in acquisition and analysis of sMRI and fMRI data, with supervised research to address the following specific aims: (1) To analyze existing high resolution imaging data from 300 normal children and adolescents by adapting measurement tools that will provide localized information about structural change throughout development. (2) To categorize individuals based on sMRI data in such a way to enable reasonable comparisons across developmental stages. It is hypothesized that chronological age will only roughly correlate with groups of subjects that are categorized by patterns of changing brain structure. (3) To investigate neurobehavioral correlates of brain maturation in a small prospective study using sMRI, and modern cognitive psychological tests for detailed assessment of learning and memory abilities. (4) To assess neurobehavioral assessment. It is hypothesized that dissociative brain regions will be involved in distinct cognitive functions (e.g., verbal memory vs. spatial memory), and similar brain regions will be implicated in the fMRI studies of memory, and the sMRI/memory correlation studies.