Mousley Alexa, Akarca Danyal, Astle Duncan E
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK.
Nat Commun. 2025 Jan 8;16(1):490. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-55178-x.
Structural brain organization in infancy is associated with later cognitive, behavioral, and educational outcomes. Due to practical limitations, such as technological advancements and data availability of fetal MRI, there is still much we do not know about the early emergence of topological organization. We combine the developing Human Connectome Project's large infant dataset with generative network modeling to simulate the emergence of network organization over early development. Preterm infants had reduced connectivity, shorter connection lengths, and lower network efficiency compared to term-born infants. The models were able to recapitulate the organizational differences between term and preterm networks and revealed that preterm infant networks are better simulated under tighter wiring constraints than term infants. Tighter constraints for preterm models resulted in shorter connection lengths while preserving vital, long-range rich club connections. These simulations suggest that preterm birth is associated with a renegotiation of the cost-value wiring trade-off that may drive the emergence of different network organization.
婴儿期的大脑结构组织与后期的认知、行为和教育成果相关。由于实际限制，如胎儿MRI的技术进步和数据可用性，我们对拓扑组织的早期出现仍知之甚少。我们将不断发展的人类连接组计划的大型婴儿数据集与生成网络模型相结合，以模拟早期发育过程中网络组织的出现。与足月儿相比，早产儿的连通性降低、连接长度缩短且网络效率较低。这些模型能够概括足月儿和早产儿网络之间的组织差异，并表明在更严格的布线约束下，早产儿网络比足月儿网络能得到更好的模拟。对早产儿模型的更严格约束导致连接长度缩短，同时保留了重要的长程富连接俱乐部连接。这些模拟表明，早产与成本-价值布线权衡的重新调整有关，这可能推动不同网络组织的出现。
