Department of Radiology, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
Rudi Schulte Research Institute, Santa Barbara, California.
Prenat Diagn. 2018 Dec;38(13):1042-1048. doi: 10.1002/pd.5374. Epub 2018 Nov 6.
Anomalous neurological development associated with congenital heart disease (CHD) has been reported as early as third trimester of fetal development. While several studies have characterized variations in CHD neurodevelopmental outcomes in early childhood, these reports are often confounded by postnatal factors such as surgical outcome. Recent studies have focused on the comparing neurological variations between fetuses with CHD and normal controls. In this work, we present a comparison of in utero variations in brain development between fetuses with different types of CHD, by analyzing them under categories of single ventricle versus biventricular cardiac anatomy.
Using recent advances in fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we quantify the volumetric trajectories of various brain tissues (such as cortical plate, developing white matter, cerebrospinal fluid [CSF], and cerebellum).
Our study is the first to differentiate between intraventricular and extra-axial CSF thereby allowing us to better identify variations in brain composition of the fetuses.
Overall, our findings show that while total brain volume is similar between fetuses with single and biventricular anatomy, they exhibit statistically significant disparity in brain composition.
先天性心脏病（CHD）相关的神经发育异常早在胎儿发育的第三个月就有报道。虽然有几项研究描述了婴幼儿 CHD 神经发育结局的变化，但这些报告往往受到术后等因素的干扰。最近的研究集中在比较 CHD 胎儿和正常对照组之间的神经差异。在这项工作中，我们通过分析单心室与双心室心脏解剖结构的类别，比较了不同类型 CHD 胎儿的脑发育的宫内变化。
我们利用胎儿磁共振成像（MRI）的最新进展，量化了各种脑组织（如皮质板、发育中的白质、脑脊液[CSF]和小脑）的容积轨迹。
我们的研究首次区分了脑室内部和外部 CSF，从而使我们能够更好地识别胎儿脑成分的变化。
总的来说，我们的发现表明，虽然单心室和双心室解剖结构的胎儿总脑容量相似，但它们的脑成分存在统计学上的显著差异。
