Scientists create new map of the developing cerebral cortex



With previously unheard-of clarity, researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have mapped the cortex's surface in the developing human brain, revealing the growth of important functional areas from two months before birth to two years following.

The new cortical development mapping, which was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a potent new approach to the study of brain-development disorders like autism and schizophrenia. It also represents an important resource for future research on brain development.

According to study senior author Gang Li, PhD, an associate professor of radiology at the UNC School of Medicine, "These data provide a crucial reference for studying and understanding the dynamics of early brain development."

Ying Huang, a PhD candidate in Li's group, was the study's primary author.

A covering of brain cells called the cortex surrounds a large portion of the rest of the brain. It is proportionately larger in humans than in other mammals and is the most evolved part of the brain. It is in charge of higher, uniquely human processes including language skills and abstract reasoning.

The most dynamic time for cortical development is from the third trimester of pregnancy through the first two years of life. During this time, the brain significantly thickens and by creating intricate cortical folds, develops in surface area even more quickly.

Autism and schizophrenia have been associated with abnormalities in this phase of cortical thickness and expansion. However, neuroscientists wish they had a more thorough knowledge of this stage of development. They have had a particular need for more thorough, high-resolution mapping that "parcellates" the developing cortex into separate regions with their own development rates, particularly surface area growth rates, across the fetal to toddler age range.                    
Li and colleagues did precisely this mapping for the study. First, they obtained a collection of 1,037 excellent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images of infants between the ages of three months and two years. The Developing Human Connectome Project and the UNC/UMN Baby Connectome Project provided the scans for this study. The team divided the cortical surface into a virtual mesh made up of thousands of tiny circular sections and calculated the surface expansion rate for each of these areas using cutting-edge, computer-based image processing techniques to interpret the scan data.

Despite the fact that the analysis did not begin with any presumptions regarding the positions of the brain's structures or functional regions, this regionalization of the brain was still visible in the maps that were produced, based only on the various rates at which the surface of the brain expanded. The researchers defined a total of 18 different sections, which they discovered to be highly linked with the functional regions of the growing cortex.

During this developmental window, "all these locations show tremendous expansion in surface area, with each region having a separate trajectory," Li noted.

The maps showed that each region generally followed the same developmental course as its counterpart in the opposing hemisphere of the cortex. There were also obvious gender differences. There were still disparities in several locations even after accounting for the overall surface area of the brains, which is larger in men. For instance, early in the second year after birth, the medial prefrontal area of the left hemisphere, which is thought to house crucial abilities like attention and working memory, grew proportionately larger in males.

The analysis also revealed that the patterns of cortical surface area expansion and cortical thickness development in this early stage of life were quite dissimilar, indicating that different mechanisms are involved in each of these two metrics of brain development.

Overall, the mapping offers important fresh insights on how the brain develops, according to Li.

He now intends to expand on this strategy using MRI scan datasets that begin at younger ages and end at older ones. In the future, they also intend to examine scan records pertaining to kids with autism spectrum disorders or other neurodevelopmental issues. Such investigations may provide information about the causes of these disorders as well as early warning indications or biomarkers that may one day be used to deliver earlier and more effective therapies.

Ying Huang, Zhengwang Wu, Fan Wang, Dan Hu, Tengfei Li, Lei Guo, Li Wang, Weili Lin, and Gang Li co-authored the PNAS article titled "Mapping developmental regionalization and patterns of cortical surface area from 29 post-menstrual weeks to 2 years of age." The BCP MRI scans were performed at the UNC Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC) in Chapel Hill under the direction of Weili Lin, PhD.

University of North Carolina Health Care

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