Brain mapping
Children's Hospital Boston is playing a primary role in the national landmark study seeking to map normal brain function and development in healthy children from birth to adulthood. The seven-center study, already two years in the planning, was begun this summer, after final sign-off from the National Institutes of Health, which is funding the multi-million-dollar project.
The study seeks to enroll more than 500 children to participate in the study. Children's, which has committed itself to enrolling the largest number of children of all the participating centers, will generate the largest body of data for both cross-sectional and longitudinal imaging of the brain. Children's also is one of three centers that will participate in both arms of the study. One arm will focus on children between the ages of 0 and 4, and the other on children between the ages of 5 and 18. The last age of entry for the study will be 18, and those individuals will be followed through age 22. The other participating centers are the University of Cincinnati; University of Texas Children's Hospital; Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; the University of California, Irvine; the University of California, Los Angeles; Washington University in St. Louis; and Montreal Neurological Institute.
"This will be the first correlated neuroimaging and neurobehavioral database for typically developing children. It will serve as a benchmark against which to compare brain development structure and function in children who do not develop normally," says Michael Rivkin, MD, principal investigator of the study at Children's. "We know a lot about the steps of development before birth, and we have a strong sense about what takes place after birth. But we don't have the library of imaging documentation."
Technology utilized for the study will include:
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conventional magnetic resonance sequences, which create high resolution anatomic images of the brain;
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magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which gauges the biochemical information in discrete areas of the brain and measures the chemical composition of white matter and neurons; and
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diffusion tensor imaging (for those children who fall between the ages of 0 and 4), which measures the net direction of water movement in the brain and provides detailed structural information about white matter organization.
Imaging data also will be cross-referenced with cognitive and neurobehavioral testing.
"While the impact of learning disabilities is far-reaching, scientific progress in the area of cognitive disability has been limited by the availability of quantitative tools with which to non-invasively probe the human central nervous system. The magnetic resonance imaging tools employed in this study represent the first wave of these long-sought instruments," says Rivkin.
