Imaging White Matter Maturation During Healthy Brain Development

描述(申请人提供)：大脑发育异常被认为是导致许多精神健康和精神疾病的生理学和病因，其中包括自闭症、精神分裂症、注意力缺陷和强迫症。大脑成熟的一个关键组成部分是髓鞘形成的过程，即围绕白质轴突的脂肪髓鞘层的发展，这加速了离散大脑区域之间的信息传输。尽管髓鞘在正常的脑功能中起着至关重要的作用，但这些有效的沟通途径的建立和维持；到目前为止，对髓鞘的空间和时间进化还知之甚少。此外，髓鞘成熟与认知和行为发育之间的关系，例如运动协调、语言或视觉接收的进化，仍然知之甚少。这项建议旨在解决这两个知识上的不足，对健康神经发育过程中的髓鞘形成进行第一次定量和纵向研究。与同步的认知和行为评估相结合，这些数据将为正常大脑发育提供一个新的前景。这一标准化的数据集将具有独特的定位，以促进健康和疑似异常发育之间的具体量化比较，使研究人员能够识别和建立相关缺陷的空间和时间模式。这项研究的最终目标是定量绘制健康人群头5年的髓鞘形成轨迹，并检查髓鞘成熟与认知和行为发育之间的关系。为了实现这一目标，将首先进一步开发和优化一种新的髓鞘定量成像方法，称为mcDESPOT，用于儿科参与者。使用这种优化的技术，整个大脑的髓鞘成熟轨迹将通过在整个发育过程中的递增时间点获得高空间分辨率的全脑髓鞘地图来重建。在128名婴儿(3-24个月)和128名幼儿(2-5岁)之后，将分别以有效的3个月和6个月的间隔进行扫描和与年龄相适应的心理测量测试。经过适当的调整，这些数据将导致14个特定年龄的平均髓鞘图谱的创建，提供第一个关于体内髓鞘成熟的定量描述。这些髓鞘测量和认知之间的关系将通过与运动协调、语言和视觉接收的认知评估进行比较来研究，为大脑正常发育以及每个阶段涉及哪些大脑区域提供新的见解。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Abnormal brain maturation is believed to contribute to the path physiology and etiology of a number of mental health and psychiatric disorders, amongst them autism, schizophrenia, attention deficit and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A critical component of brain maturation is the process of myelination, the development of the fatty myelin layer surrounding white matter axons, which speeds information transfer between discrete brain regions. Despite the crucial role myelination plays in normal brain function, though the establishment and maintenance of these efficient communication pathways; to date little is known quantitatively about the spatial and temporal evolution of myelination. Moreover, the relationships between myelin maturation and cognitive and behavioral development, for example the evolution of motor coordination, language or visual reception, remain poorly understood. This proposal aims to address both of these deficiencies in knowledge, performing the first quantitative and longitudinal study of myelination during healthy neurodevelopment. Paired with synchronized cognitive and behavioral assessments, this data will provide a new vista of normal brain development. This normative dataset will be uniquely positioned to facilitate specific quantitative comparisons between healthy and suspected abnormal development, allowing researchers to identify and establish the spatial and temporal patterns of relevant deficits. The ultimate goals of this research are to quantitatively map the myelination trajectory over the first 5 years of life in a healthy population, and to examine relationships between myelin maturation and cognitive and behavioral development. To achieve this aim, a new method for quantitative myelin imaging, termed mcDESPOT, will first be further develop and optimized for use in pediatric participants. Using this optimized technique, myelin maturation trajectories throughout the brain will be reconstructed by acquiring high-spatial resolution, whole-brain myelin maps at incremented time points throughout development. Following 128 infants (3-24 months of age) and 128 toddlers (2-5 years), scanning and age-appropriate psychometric testing will be performed at effective 3 and 6- month intervals, respectively. Appropriately aligned, this data will result in the creation of 14 age-specific averaged myelin maps, providing the first quantitative description of myelin maturation in vivo. Relationships between these myelin measures and cognition will be investigated through comparison with the cognitive assessments of motor coordination, language and visual reception, providing new insight into how the brain normally develops and which brain regions are involved at each stage.