Adequate cerebral blood flow (CBF) is essential to proper brain development and function. Detailed characterization of CBF developmental trajectories will lead to better understanding of the development of cognitive, motor, and sensory functions, as well as behaviour in children. Previous studies have shown CBF increases during infancy and decreases during adolescence; however, the trajectories during childhood, and in particular the timing of peak CBF, remain unclear. Here, we used arterial spin labeling to map age-related changes of CBF across a large longitudinal sample that included 279 scans on 96 participants (46 girls and 50 boys) aged 2-7 years. CBF maps were analyzed using hierarchical linear regression for every voxel inside the grey matter mask, controlling for multiple comparisons. The results revealed a significant positive linear association between CBF and age in distributed brain regions including prefrontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital cortex, and in the cerebellum. There were no differences in developmental trajectories between males and females. Our findings show that CBF continues to increase until the age of 7 years, likely supporting ongoing improvements in behaviour, cognition, motor, and sensory functions in early childhood.
Pubmed ID: 31561017 RIS Download
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Software tool as a cross-platform NIfTI format image viewer. Used for viewing and exporting of brain images. MRIcroGL is a variant of MRIcron.
View all literature mentionsA package for writing fMRI analysis pipelines and interfacing with external analysis packages (SPM, FSL, AFNI). Current neuroimaging software offer users an incredible opportunity to analyze their data in different ways, with different underlying assumptions. However, this has resulted in a heterogeneous collection of specialized applications without transparent interoperability or a uniform operating interface. Nipype, an open-source, community-developed initiative under the umbrella of Nipy, is a Python project that solves these issues by providing a uniform interface to existing neuroimaging software and by facilitating interaction between these packages within a single workflow. Nipype provides an environment that encourages interactive exploration of algorithms from different packages (e.g., SPM, FSL), eases the design of workflows within and between packages, and reduces the learning curve necessary to use different packages. Nipype is creating a collaborative platform for neuroimaging software development in a high-level language and addressing limitations of existing pipeline systems.
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