Developmental aspects of pediatric fMRI: considerations for image acquisition, analysis, and interpretation

Functional MRI provides a powerful means to identify and trace the evolution, development, and consolidation of cognitive neural networks through normal childhood. Neural network perturbations due to disease and other adverse factors during development can also be explored. Studies performed to date suggest that normal children older than 5 years show activation maps comparable to adults for similar cognitive paradigms. Minor differences in adult and pediatric activation maps may reflect age dependent strategies or maturation of cognitive networks. However, there are important physiologic and anatomic differences in children, varying with age, that may affect the acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of pediatric fMRI data. Differences between children and adult fMRI comparison studies may reflect technical aspects of data acquisition as much as developmental and brain maturation factors.