Fetal and Perinatal Medicine Research Group, Institut d'Investigacions Biomediques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS), Barcelona, Spain.
Neuroimage. 2013 Dec;83:901-11. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.045. Epub 2013 Jul 22.
Obtaining individual biomarkers for the prediction of altered neurological outcome is a challenge of modern medicine and neuroscience. Connectomics based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) stands as a good candidate to exhaustively extract information from MRI by integrating the information obtained in a few network features that can be used as individual biomarkers of neurological outcome. However, this approach typically requires the use of diffusion and/or functional MRI to extract individual brain networks, which require high acquisition times and present an extreme sensitivity to motion artifacts, critical problems when scanning fetuses and infants. Extraction of individual networks based on morphological similarity from gray matter is a new approach that benefits from the power of graph theory analysis to describe gray matter morphology as a large-scale morphological network from a typical clinical anatomic acquisition such as T1-weighted MRI. In the present paper we propose a methodology to normalize these large-scale morphological networks to a brain network with standardized size based on a parcellation scheme. The proposed methodology was applied to reconstruct individual brain networks of 63 one-year-old infants, 41 infants with intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) and 22 controls, showing altered network features in the IUGR group, and their association with neurodevelopmental outcome at two years of age by means of ordinal regression analysis of the network features obtained with Bayley Scale for Infant and Toddler Development, third edition. Although it must be more widely assessed, this methodology stands as a good candidate for the development of biomarkers for altered neurodevelopment in the pediatric population.
获得用于预测神经功能改变的个体生物标志物是现代医学和神经科学的挑战。基于磁共振成像(MRI)的连接组学是一种很好的候选方法,可以通过整合可作为神经功能改变个体生物标志物的少数网络特征中的信息,从 MRI 中详尽地提取信息。然而,这种方法通常需要使用扩散和/或功能 MRI 来提取个体脑网络,这需要较长的采集时间,并且对运动伪影极其敏感,这在对胎儿和婴儿进行扫描时是关键问题。基于形态相似性从灰质中提取个体网络是一种新方法,它受益于图论分析的强大功能,可以将灰质形态描述为来自典型临床解剖采集(例如 T1 加权 MRI)的大规模形态网络。在本文中,我们提出了一种将这些大规模形态网络归一化为基于分割方案的标准化大小的大脑网络的方法。该方法应用于重建 63 名一岁婴儿、41 名宫内生长受限(IUGR)婴儿和 22 名对照婴儿的个体脑网络,显示 IUGR 组的网络特征发生改变,并通过对婴儿和幼儿发展的贝利量表第三版获得的网络特征进行有序回归分析,研究其与两岁时神经发育结局的关系。尽管还需要更广泛的评估,但该方法是为儿科人群中改变的神经发育开发生物标志物的良好候选方法。