MRC Centre for Reproductive Health, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2024 Mar;45(4):e26660. doi: 10.1002/hbm.26660.
The early life environment programmes cortical architecture and cognition across the life course. A measure of cortical organisation that integrates information from multimodal MRI and is unbound by arbitrary parcellations has proven elusive, which hampers efforts to uncover the perinatal origins of cortical health. Here, we use the Vogt-Bailey index to provide a fine-grained description of regional homogeneities and sharp variations in cortical microstructure based on feature gradients, and we investigate the impact of being born preterm on cortical development at term-equivalent age. Compared with term-born controls, preterm infants have a homogeneous microstructure in temporal and occipital lobes, and the medial parietal, cingulate, and frontal cortices, compared with term infants. These observations replicated across two independent datasets and were robust to differences that remain in the data after matching samples and alignment of processing and quality control strategies. We conclude that cortical microstructural architecture is altered in preterm infants in a spatially distributed rather than localised fashion.
早期生活环境会影响整个生命过程中的皮质结构和认知。一种能够整合多模态 MRI 信息且不受任意分割限制的皮质组织度量方法一直难以捉摸，这阻碍了人们揭示皮质健康的围产期起源。在这里，我们使用 Vogt-Bailey 指数，基于特征梯度，提供了一种对皮质微观结构的区域同质性和急剧变化的精细描述，并研究了出生前早产对足月等效年龄皮质发育的影响。与足月出生的对照组相比，早产儿的颞叶和枕叶以及内侧顶叶、扣带回和额皮质的微观结构更均匀，而足月出生的婴儿则更不均匀。这些观察结果在两个独立的数据集之间得到了复制，并且在匹配样本和对齐处理以及质量控制策略后，数据中仍然存在差异时，结果仍然具有稳健性。我们得出的结论是，皮质微观结构在早产儿中的改变是空间分布的，而不是局部的。
