Abstract
During the prenatal period and the first postnatal years, the human brain undergoes rapid growth, which establishes a preliminary infrastructure for the subsequent development of cognition and behavior. To understand the underlying processes of brain functioning and identify potential sources of developmental disorders, it is essential to uncover the developmental rules that govern this critical period. In this study, graph theory modeling and network science analysis were employed to investigate the impact of age, gender, weight, and typical and atypical development on brain development. Local and global topologies of functional connectomes obtained from rs-fMRI data were collected from 421 neonates aged between 31 and 45 postmenstrual weeks who were in natural sleep without any sedation. The results showed that global efficiency, local efficiency, clustering coefficient, and small-worldness increased with age, while modularity and characteristic path length decreased with age. The normalized rich-club coefficient displayed a U-shaped pattern during development. The study also examined the global and local impacts of gender, weight, and group differences between typical and atypical cases. The findings presented some new insights into the maturation of functional brain networks and their relationship with cognitive development and neurodevelopmental disorders.
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The dHCP is an open-access project. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the following URL: http://www.developingconnectome.org.
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Acknowledgements
Data were provided by the developing Human Connectome Project, KCL-Imperial-Oxford Consortium funded by the European Research Council under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. [319456]. We are grateful to the families who generously supported this trial. This work was partially supported by the Institute for Research in Fundamental Science (IPM) of Iran under the grant No. CS1402-4-162.
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This work was partially supported by the Institute for Research in Fundamental Science (IPM) of Iran under the grant No. CS1402-4-162.
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Both authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection was performed by RN and MS. RN implemented the computer code and supporting algorithms and analyzed the data. RN wrote the manuscript and MS commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Nazari, R., Salehi, M. Early development of the functional brain network in newborns. Brain Struct Funct 228, 1725–1739 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-023-02681-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-023-02681-4