development trends of white matter connectivity in the first years of life发展趋势的白质连接在第一年的生活.pdfVIP

Development Trends of White Matter Connectivity in the First Years of Life 1 1¤ 1 2 1 1 Pew-Thian Yap , Yong Fan , Yasheng Chen , John H. Gilmore , Weili Lin , Dinggang Shen * 1 Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America, 2 Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America Abstract The human brain is organized into a collection of interacting networks with specialized functions to support various cognitive functions. Recent research has reached a consensus that the brain manifests small-world topology, which implicates both global and local efficiency at minimal wiring costs, and also modular organization, which indicates functional segregation and specialization. However, the important questions of how and when the small-world topology and modular organization come into existence remain largely unanswered. Taking a graph theoretic approach, we attempt to shed light on this matter by an in vivo study, using diffusion tensor imaging based fiber tractography, on 39 healthy pediatric subjects with longitudinal data collected at average ages of 2 weeks, 1 year, and 2 years. Our results indicate that the small-world architecture exists at birth with efficiency that increases in later stages of development. In addition, we found that the networks are broad scale in nature, signifying the existence of pivotal connection hubs and resilience of the brain network to random and targeted attacks. We also observed, with development, that the brain network seems to evolv