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Joint Analysis of Functional and Structural Connectomes Between Preterm and Term Infant Brains via Canonical
Shu Zhang1, Zhibin He2, Lei Du2
1Center for Brain and Brain-Inspired Computing Research, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China.
Insights
Preterm infants show distinct brain connectome differences compared to term infants. This study identifies specific functional and structural connections that differentiate these groups, offering insights into developmental impairments.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Biology
- Medical Imaging
Background:
- Preterm birth is a global health concern with significant long-term cognitive implications for affected infants.
- Understanding brain development differences between preterm and term infants is crucial for addressing developmental impairments.
- Existing research highlights the need to explore the relationship between brain structure and function in preterm infants.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between brain functional and structural connectomes in preterm and term infant brains.
- To identify differentiable connectome features that distinguish preterm from term infant brains.
- To understand how the functional-structural connectome relationship differs in preterm infants.
Main Methods:
- Proposed a novel approach combining Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) with Locality Preserving Projection (LPP).
- Applied CCA to study the relationship between functional and structural brain connections.
- Utilized LPP to identify distinguishing features for differentiating preterm and term infant brains using fMRI and dMRI data from the dHCP dataset.
Main Results:
- Identified 89 functional and 97 structural connections that significantly differentiate preterm and term infant brains.
- Found that identified functional connections are predominantly short-range and within specific networks.
- Discovered that identified structural connections are typically long-range, spanning across different functional networks.
Conclusions:
- The study reveals distinct patterns in functional and structural brain connectivity between preterm and term infants.
- Innovatively shows that functional and structural changes may diverge longitudinally in preterm infants.
- Provides new insights into brain-behavior changes in preterm infants, aiding in understanding developmental outcomes.
Abstract:
Preterm is a worldwide problem that affects infants' lives significantly. Moreover, the early impairment is more than limited to isolated brain regions but also to global and profound negative outcomes later, such as cognitive disorder. Therefore, seeking the differences of brain connectome between preterm and term infant brains is a vital step for understanding the developmental impairment caused by preterm. Existing studies revealed that studying the relationship between brain function and structure, and further investigating their differentiable connectomes between preterm and term infant brains is a way to comprehend and unveil the differences that occur in the preterm infant brains. Therefore, in this article, we proposed a novel canonical correlation analysis (CCA) with locality preserving projection (LPP) approach to investigate the relationship between brain functional and structural connectomes and how such a relationship differs between preterm and term infant brains. CCA is proposed to study the relationship between functional and structural connections, while LPP is adopted to identify the distinguishing features from the connections which can differentiate the preterm and term brains. After investigating the whole brain connections on a fine-scale connectome approach, we successfully identified 89 functional and 97 structural connections, which mostly contributed to differentiate preterm and term infant brains from the functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion MRI (dMRI) of the public developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) dataset. By further exploring those identified connections, the results innovatively revealed that the identified functional connections are short-range and within the functional network. On the contrary, the identified structural connections are usually remote connections across different functional networks. In addition, these connectome-level results show the new insights that longitudinal functional changes could deviate from longitudinal structural changes in the preterm infant brains, which help us better understand the brain-behavior changes in preterm infant brains.
