A new King’s College London scanning study of 390 babies has shown distinct patterns between term and pre-term babies in the moment-to-moment activity and connectivity of brain networks.
Published in Nature Communications, the study also found that these dynamic patterns of brain connectivity in babies were linked to developmental measures of movement, language, cognition and social behavior 18 months later.
Researchers used state-of-the-art techniques to evaluate functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data on 324 full term babies and 66 pre-term babies (born at less than 37 weeks gestation). They assessed how the connectivity changed moment-to-moment during the time the baby was in the scanner to provide a dynamic picture. Previous research with babies has always used a measure of connectivity averaged over time spent in the scanner.
The study used methods that tap into how the brain connectivity fluctuates: one method that considers connectivity patterns across the whole brain and one that considers patterns within different regions of the brain.
The study identified six different brain states: three of these were across the whole brain and three were constrained to regions of the brain (occipital, sensorimotor and frontal regions). By comparing term and pre-term babies the researchers showed that different patterns of connectivity are linked to pre-term birth, for example pre-term babies spent more time in frontal and occipital brain states than term babies. They also demonstrated that brain state dynamics at birth are linked to a range of developmental outcomes in early childhood.
The data was sourced from The Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), which is led by King’s College London and funded by the European Research Council.
