Abstract
Extensive cortico-cortical connections emerge in the fetal brain during the second-to-third trimester with the rapid development of white matter fiber pathways. However, the early establishment and prenatal development of the brain’s structural network are not yet understood. In this work, we used in-utero diffusion MRI data of fetuses from 26 to 38 gestational weeks to build the fetal brain structural connectivity networks (SCN). Graph theory was adopted to investigate the developmental patterns of the fetal brain SCN. Network analyses revealed increasing global and local efficiency, modularity, and small worldness of the fetal brain during development. We observed the strengthening of short-range cortico-cortical connections and the weakening of long-range connections, reflecting the distinct developmental events of short and long-range fiber pathways during the studied period. The fetal brain SCN underwent complicated changes during the late-second-to-third trimester. The findings of this study provided valuable information on the early developmental patterns of brain cortico-cortical structural connectivity.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Takahashi, E., Hayashi, E., Schmahmann, J.D., et al.: Development of cerebellar connectivity in human fetal brains revealed by high angular resolution diffusion tractography. Neuroimage 96, 326–333 (2014)
Brown, C.J., Miller, S.P., Booth, B.G., et al.: Structural network analysis of brain development in young preterm neonates. Neuroimage 101, 667–680 (2014)
Song, L., Mishra, V., Ouyang, M., et al.: Human fetal brain connectome: structural network development from middle fetal stage to birth. Front. Neurosci. 11, 561 (2017)
Zhao, T., Mishra, V., Jeon, T., et al.: Structural network maturation of the preterm human brain. Neuroimage 185, 699–710 (2019)
Ball, G., Aljabar, P., Zebari, S., et al.: Rich-club organization of the newborn human brain. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 111(20), 7456–7461 (2014)
Tournier, J.D., Smith, R., Raffelt, D., et al.: MRtrix3: a fast, flexible and open software framework for medical image processing and visualisation. Neuroimage 202, 116137 (2019)
Deprez, M., Price, A., Christiaens, D., et al.: Higher order spherical harmonics reconstruction of fetal diffusion MRI with intensity correction. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 39(4), 1104–1113 (2020)
Tournier, J.D., Calamante, F., Connelly, A.: Robust determination of the fibre orientation distribution in diffusion MRI: non-negativity constrained super-resolved spherical deconvolution. Neuroimage 35(4), 1459–1472 (2007)
Tournier, J.D.C., Calamante, F., Connelly, A.: Improved probabilistic streamlines tractography by 2nd order integration over fibre orientation distributions. In: Proceedings of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, vol. 1670 (2010)
Smith, R.E., Tournier, J.-D., Calamante, F., et al.: SIFT2: Enabling dense quantitative assessment of brain white matter connectivity using streamlines tractography. Neuroimage 119, 338–351 (2015)
Gholipour, A., Limperopoulos, C., Clancy, S., et al.: Construction of a deformable spatiotemporal MRI atlas of the fetal brain: evaluation of similarity metrics and deformation models (2014)
Xu, X., Sun, C., Sun, J., et al.: Spatiotemporal atlas of the fetal brain depicts cortical developmental gradient in Chinese population. bioRxiv (2022)
Zhang, B., Horvath, S.: A general framework for weighted gene co-expression network analysis. Stat. Appl. Genet. Mol. Biol. 4(1), 1–45 (2005)
Latora, V., Marchiori, M.: Efficient behavior of small-world networks. Phys. Rev. Lett. 87(19), 198701 (2001)
Xu, G., Takahashi, E., Folkerth, R.D., et al.: Radial coherence of diffusion tractography in the cerebral white matter of the human fetus: neuroanatomic insights. Cereb. Cortex 24(3), 579–592 (2014)
Chen, R., Sun, C., Liu, T., et al.: Deciphering the developmental order and microstructural patterns of early white matter pathways in a diffusion MRI based fetal brain atlas. NeuroImage 119700–119700 (2022)
Takahashi, E., Folkerth, R.D., Galaburda, A.M., et al.: Emerging cerebral connectivity in the human fetal brain: an MR tractography study. Cereb. Cortex 22(2), 455–464 (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chen, R. et al. (2024). Development of the Fetal Brain Structural Connectivity Based on In-Utero Diffusion MRI. In: Wang, G., Yao, D., Gu, Z., Peng, Y., Tong, S., Liu, C. (eds) 12th Asian-Pacific Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering. APCMBE 2023. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51455-5_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51455-5_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-51454-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-51455-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)