Early Development and the Functional Correlation of Brain Structural Connectivity in Preterm-Born Infants

Exuberant axon growth and competitive pruning lead to dramatic and comprehensive changes in white matter pathways of the infant brain during the first few postnatal months, yet the development of structural configuration in early infancy has not been fully characterized. This study aimed to investig...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in neuroscience 2022-07, Vol.16, p.949230-949230
Main Authors: Liu, Tingting, Zhao, Zhiyong, You, Yuqing, Gao, Fusheng, Lv, Ying, Li, Mingyan, Ji, Chai, Lai, Can, Zhang, Hongxi, Wu, Dan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Age
Babies
Brain
Clustering
diffusion MRI
Efficiency
infant brain development
Infants
Language
language outcome
Neonates
Neural networks
Neuroscience
Reproducibility
structural network
Substantia alba
tractography
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Summary:Exuberant axon growth and competitive pruning lead to dramatic and comprehensive changes in white matter pathways of the infant brain during the first few postnatal months, yet the development of structural configuration in early infancy has not been fully characterized. This study aimed to investigate the developmental trajectory of structural connectivity reflecting relative fiber density in 43 preterm-born infants aged 0–3 months of corrected age without any complications utilizing probabilistic tractography based on fiber orientation distribution and to explore the potential function correlation associated with the network properties based on the Chinese Communication Development of Infant at 10 months of corrected age. The findings revealed significant increases in global efficiency, local efficiency, normalized clustering coefficient, and small-worldness ( p adj < 0.001 for each), while the normalized characteristic path length showed a non-significant decrease with age ( p adj = 0.118). Furthermore, those findings were validated by another parcelation strategy. In addition, the early local efficiency was found to be significantly correlated with words understood at 10 months of corrected age. A unique developmental pattern of structural networks with enhancing efficiency and the small-world property was found in early infancy, which was different from those of neonates or toddlers. In addition, this study revealed a significant correlation between local efficiency and late language comprehension, which indicated that enhanced structural connectivity may lay the structural foundation for language specialization.
ISSN:1662-453X
1662-4548
1662-453X
DOI:10.3389/fnins.2022.949230