Reproducibility of neuroimaging research on infant brain development remains limited due to highly variable protocols and processing approaches. Progress towards reproducible pipelines is limited by a lack of benchmarks such as gold standard brain segmentations. Addressing this core limitation, we constructed the Baby Open Brains (BOBs) Repository, an open source resource comprising manually curated and expert-reviewed infant brain segmentations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, a multi-site prospective longitudinal cohort study, will examine human brain, cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development beginning prenatally and planned through early childhood. The acquisition of multimodal magnetic resonance-based brain development data is central to the study's core protocol. However, application of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) methods in this population is complicated by technical challenges and difficulties of imaging in early life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is an imminent need to identify neural markers during preadolescence that are linked to developing depression during adolescence, especially among youth at elevated familial risk. However, longitudinal studies remain scarce and exhibit mixed findings. Here we aimed to elucidate functional connectivity (FC) patterns among preadolescents that interact with familial depression risk to predict depression two years later.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry Glob Open Sci
May 2024
Background: Fear overgeneralization is a promising pathogenic mechanism of clinical anxiety. A dominant model posits that hippocampal pattern separation failures drive overgeneralization. Hippocampal network-targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation (HNT-TMS) has been shown to strengthen hippocampal-dependent learning/memory processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior research suggests that the organization of the language network in the brain is left-dominant and becomes more lateralized with age and increasing language skill. The age at which specific components of the language network become adult-like varies depending on the abilities they subserve. So far, a large, developmental study has not included a language task paradigm, so we introduce a method to study resting-state laterality in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividual differences in cognition during childhood are associated with important social, physical, and mental health outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Given that cortical surface arealization during development reflects the brain's functional prioritization, quantifying variation in the topography of functional brain networks across the developing cortex may provide insight regarding individual differences in cognition. We test this idea by defining personalized functional networks (PFNs) that account for interindividual heterogeneity in functional brain network topography in 9-10 year olds from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroimaging research faces a crisis of reproducibility. With massive sample sizes and greater data complexity, this problem becomes more acute. Software that operates on imaging data defined using the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) - BIDS Apps - have provided a substantial advance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMagnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can non-invasively measure levels of endogenous metabolites in living tissue and is of great interest to neuroscience and clinical research. To this day, MRS data analysis workflows differ substantially between groups, frequently requiring many manual steps to be performed on individual datasets, e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics (CBIT) is a first-line treatment for tic disorders that aims to improve controllability over tics that an individual finds distressing or impairing. However, it is only effective for approximately half of patients. Supplementary motor area (SMA)-directed neurocircuitry plays a strong role in motor inhibition, and activity in this region is thought to contribute to tic expression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
February 2024
Background: Family history of depression is a robust predictor of early-onset depression, which may confer risk through alterations in neural circuits that have been implicated in reward and emotional processing. These alterations may be evident in youths who are at familial risk for depression but who do not currently have depression. However, the identification of robust and replicable findings has been hindered by few studies and small sample sizes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRates of return to use in addiction treatment remain high. We argue that the development of improved treatment options will require advanced understanding of individual heterogeneity in Substance Use Disorders (SUDs). We hypothesized that considerable individual differences exist in the three functional domains underlying addiction-approach-related behavior, executive function, and negative emotionality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Brain segmentation of infant magnetic resonance (MR) images is vitally important for studying typical and atypical brain development. The infant brain undergoes many changes throughout the first years of postnatal life, making tissue segmentation difficult for most existing algorithms. Here we introduce a deep neural network BIBSNet ( aby and nfant rain egmentation Neural work), an open-source, community-driven model for robust and generalizable brain segmentation leveraging data augmentation and a large sample size of manually annotated images.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLongitudinal studies of infants' brains are essential for research and clinical detection of neurodevelopmental disorders. However, for infant brain MRI scans, effective deep learning-based segmentation frameworks exist only within small age intervals due to the large image intensity and contrast changes that take place in the early postnatal stages of development. However, using different segmentation frameworks or models at different age intervals within the same longitudinal data set would cause segmentation inconsistencies and age-specific biases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) is a powerful tool for characterizing brain changes, but it has yet to reliably predict higher-order cognition. This may be attributed to small effect sizes of such brain-behavior relationships, which can lead to underpowered, variable results when utilizing typical sample sizes (N∼25). Inspired by techniques in genomics, we implement the polyneuro risk score (PNRS) framework - the application of multivariate techniques to RSFC data and validation in an independent sample.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Chronic low back pain (cLBP) affects the quality of life of 52 million Americans and leads to an enormous personal and economic burden. A multidisciplinary approach to cLBP management is recommended. Since medication has limited efficacy and there are mounting concerns about opioid addiction, the American College of Physicians and American Pain Society recommend non-pharmacological interventions, such as mind and body approaches (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Neuropathic pain after spinal cord injury (SCI) is notoriously hard to treat. Mechanisms of neuropathic pain are unclear, which makes finding effective treatments challenging. Prior studies have shown that adults with SCI have body awareness deficits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: About 69% of the 299,000 Americans living with spinal cord injury (SCI) experience long-term debilitating neuropathic pain. New treatments are needed because current treatments do not provide enough pain relief. We have found that insular-opercular brain network alterations may contribute to neuropathic pain and that restoring this network could reduce neuropathic pain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) are considered the subclinical portion of the psychosis continuum. Research suggests that there are resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) substrates of PLEs, yet it is unclear if the same substrates underlie more severe psychosis. Here, to our knowledge, we report the first study to build a cross-validated rsFC model of PLEs in a large community sample and directly test its ability to explain psychosis in an independent sample of patients with psychosis and their relatives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a specification accompanied by a software ecosystem that was designed to create reproducible and automated workflows for processing neuroimaging data. BIDS Apps flexibly build workflows based on the metadata detected in a dataset. However, even BIDS valid metadata can include incorrect values or omissions that result in inconsistent processing across sessions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchizophrenia is characterized by abnormal brain structure such as global reductions in gray matter volume. Machine learning models trained to estimate the age of brains from structural neuroimaging data consistently show advanced brain-age to be associated with schizophrenia. Yet, it is unclear whether advanced brain-age is specific to schizophrenia compared to other psychotic disorders, and whether evidence that brain structure is "older" than chronological age actually reflects neurodevelopmental rather than atrophic processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMagnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has transformed our understanding of the human brain through well-replicated mapping of abilities to specific structures (for example, lesion studies) and functions (for example, task functional MRI (fMRI)). Mental health research and care have yet to realize similar advances from MRI. A primary challenge has been replicating associations between inter-individual differences in brain structure or function and complex cognitive or mental health phenotypes (brain-wide association studies (BWAS)).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) affects early brain development and has been associated with hippocampal damage. Animal models of PAE have suggested that some subfields of the hippocampus may be more susceptible to damage than others. Recent advances in structural MRI processing now allow us to examine the morphology of hippocampal subfields in humans with PAE.
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