Dataset Information

Neonate and infant brain development from birth to 2 years assessed using MRI-based quantitative susceptibility mapping.

ABSTRACT: The human brain rapidly develops during the first two years following birth. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) provides information of iron and myelin variations. It is considered to be a valuable tool for studying brain development in early life. In the present work, QSM is performed on neonates, 1-year and 2-year old infants, as well as a group of adults for the purpose of reference. Age-specific templates representing common brain structures are built for each age group. The neonate and infant QSM templates have shown some unique findings compared to conventional T1w and T2w imaging techniques. The contrast between the gray and white matters on the QSM images did not change through brain development from neonate to adult. A linear correlation was found between brain myelination determined in this study and the microscopic myelin degree determined by a previous autopsy study. Also, the magnetic susceptibility values of the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) exhibit a gradually decreasing trend from birth to 2 years old and to adulthood. The findings suggest that the macromolecular content, myelin, and iron may play the most important contributing factors for the magnetic susceptibility of neonate and infant brain. QSM can be a powerful means to study early brain development and related pathologies that involve alterations in macromolecular content, iron, or brain myelination.

SUBMITTER: Zhang Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6292682 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Neonate and infant brain development from birth to 2 years assessed using MRI-based quantitative susceptibility mapping.

Zhang Yuyao Y Shi Jingjing J Wei Hongjiang H Han Victor V Zhu Wen-Zhen WZ Liu Chunlei C

NeuroImage 20181010

The human brain rapidly develops during the first two years following birth. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) provides information of iron and myelin variations. It is considered to be a valuable tool for studying brain development in early life. In the present work, QSM is performed on neonates, 1-year and 2-year old infants, as well as a group of adults for the purpose of reference. Age-specific templates representing common brain structures are built for each age group. The neonate a ...[more]

PMID: 30315906

Similar Datasets

Project description:Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) estimates the underlying tissue magnetic susceptibility from MRI gradient-echo phase signal and typically requires several processing steps. These steps involve phase unwrapping, brain volume extraction, background phase removal and solving an ill-posed inverse problem relating the tissue phase to the underlying susceptibility distribution. The resulting susceptibility map is known to suffer from inaccuracy near the edges of the brain tissues, in part due to imperfect brain extraction, edge erosion of the brain tissue and the lack of phase measurement outside the brain. This inaccuracy has thus hindered the application of QSM for measuring susceptibility of tissues near the brain edges, e.g., quantifying cortical layers and generating superficial venography. To address these challenges, we propose a learning-based QSM reconstruction method that directly estimates the magnetic susceptibility from total phase images without the need for brain extraction and background phase removal, referred to as autoQSM. The neural network has a modified U-net structure and is trained using QSM maps computed by a two-step QSM method. 209 healthy subjects with ages ranging from 11 to 82 years were employed for patch-wise network training. The network was validated on data dissimilar to the training data, e.g., in vivo mouse brain data and brains with lesions, which suggests that the network generalized and learned the underlying mathematical relationship between magnetic field perturbation and magnetic susceptibility. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons were performed between autoQSM and other two-step QSM methods. AutoQSM was able to recover magnetic susceptibility of anatomical structures near the edges of the brain including the veins covering the cortical surface, spinal cord and nerve tracts near the mouse brain boundaries. The advantages of high-quality maps, no need for brain volume extraction, and high reconstruction speed demonstrate autoQSM's potential for future applications.

Dataset Information

Neonate and infant brain development from birth to 2 years assessed using MRI-based quantitative susceptibility mapping.

Publications

Neonate and infant brain development from birth to 2 years assessed using MRI-based quantitative susceptibility mapping.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets