Brain charts map the rapid growth and slow decline of the human brain
over our lifetime

Date:
April 6, 2022
Source:
University of Cambridge
Summary:
An international team of researchers has created a series of brain
charts spanning our entire lifespan -- from a 15 week old fetus to
100 year old adult -- that show how our brains expand rapidly in
early life and slowly shrink as we age. The charts are the result
of a research project spanning six continents and bringing together
possibly the largest ever MRI datasets ever aggregated -- almost
125,000 brain scans from over a 100 different studies. Although
not currently intended for clinical use, the team hopes the charts
will become a routine clinical tool similar to how standardised
paediatric growth charts are used.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
An international team of researchers has created a series of brain
charts spanning our entire lifespan -- from a 15 week old fetus to 100
year old adult -- that show how our brains expand rapidly in early life
and slowly shrink as we age.


==========================================================================
The charts are the result of a research project spanning six continents
and bringing together possibly the largest ever MRI datasets ever
aggregated - - almost 125,000 brain scans from over a 100 different
studies. Although not currently intended for clinical use, the team
hopes the charts will become a routine clinical tool similar to how standardised paediatric growth charts are used.

Growth charts have been a cornerstone of paediatric healthcare for over
200 years and are used ubiquitously in clinics to help monitor the growth
and development of children in comparison to their peers. A typical growth chart might plot age on the horizontal axis versus height on the vertical
axis, but rather than being a single line, it will show a range that
reflects the natural variability in height, weight or head circumference.

There are no analogous reference charts for measuring age-related changes
in the human brain. The lack of tools for standardised assessment of
brain development and aging is particularly relevant to the study of psychiatric disorders, where the differences between conditions and the heterogeneity within them demands instruments that can say something
meaningful about a single individual in the way clinical reference
charts can, and to conditions such as Alzheimer's disease that cause degeneration of brain tissue and cognitive decline.

Today's study, published in Nature,is a major step towards filling
this gap.

Unlike paediatric growth charts, BrainChart -- published on the open
access site brainchart.io -- covers the whole lifespan, from development
in the womb through to old age, and aims to create a common language to describe the variability in brain development and maturation.

The incredible growing and shrinking brain The brain charts have allowed
the researchers to confirm -- and in some cases, show for the first time
-- developmental milestones that have previously only been hypothesised,
such as at what age the brain's major tissue classes reach peak volume
and when do specific regions of the brain reach maturity.



==========================================================================
Dr Richard Bethlehem from the Department of Psychiatry at the University
of Cambridge, one of the co-leads of the study, said: "One of the
things we've been able to do, through a very concerted global effort,
is to stitch together data across the whole life span. It's allowed us
to measure the very early, rapid changes that are happening in the brain,
and the long, slow decline as we age." Among the key milestones observed
by the team were:
* The volume of grey matter (brain cells) increases rapidly from mid-
gestation onwards, peaking just before we are six years old. It
then begins to decrease slowly.

* The volume of white matter (brain connections) also increased
rapidly
from mid-gestation through early childhood and peaks just before
we are 29 years old.

* The decline in white matter volume begins to accelerate after
50 years.

* Grey matter volume in the subcortex (which controls bodily
functions and
basic behaviour) peaks in adolescence at 14-and-a-half years old.

Towards a clinically-useful tool While the brain charts are already
proving useful for research, in the long term, the team intend them
to be used as a clinical tool. The datasets already have around 165
different diagnostic labels, meaning that researchers can see how the
brain differs in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease causes neurodegeneration and a loss of brain tissue,
so people affected by the condition are likely to have reduced brain
volume compared to their peers. In the same way that some healthy adults
are taller than others, so there is variability in brain size -- in other words, a slightly smaller brain does not necessarily indicate there is something wrong.

However, as is apparent from the brain charts, while brain size decreases naturally with age, it does so much faster in Alzheimer's patients.



==========================================================================
Dr Bethlehem explained: "We're still at an extremely early stage with
our Brain Charts, showing that it is possible to create these tools by
bringing together huge datasets. The charts are already beginning to
provide interesting insights into brain development, and our ambition
is that in future, as we integrate more datasets and refine the charts,
they could eventually become part of routine clinical practice.

"You could imagine them being used to help evaluate patients screened
for conditions such as Alzheimer's, for example, allowing doctors to
spot signs of neurodegeneration by comparing how rapidly a patient's
brain volume has changed compared to their peers." In addition, the
team hope to make the brain charts more representative of the whole
population, pointing to the need for more brain MRI data on previously under-represented socio-economic and ethnic groups.

A huge technical feat Dr Jakob Seidlitz from the Lifespan Brain
Institute at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania, another of the co-leads of the study, said: "Creating these
brain charts has involved multiple technical feats and a large team of collaborators. With brain imaging data, things are a bit more complicated
than just taking out a measuring tape and measuring someone's height,
or head circumference. There were significant challenges to deal with, including logistic and administrative hurdles as well as the huge methodological variability we find between brain imaging datasets."
The team used standardised neuroimaging software to extract data from
MRI scans, beginning with simple properties such as the volume of grey
matter or white matter, and then expanding their work to look at finer
details, such as the thickness of the cortex or the volume of specific
regions of the brain.

They used a framework implemented by the World Health Organization for generating growth charts to build their brain charts.

Altogether, they estimate that they have used around 2 million hours
of computing time, analysing close to a petabyte of data (a petabyte is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).

"This really wouldn't have been possible without access to the High
Performance Computing clusters at Cambridge," said Dr Seidlitz. "But we
still see this as a work in progress. It's a first pass at establishing
a standardised reference chart for neuroimaging. That's why we've built
the website and created a large network of collaborators. We expect to consistently update the charts and build on these models as new data
becomes available." The team have created the tool with a reference
framework to allow other researchers and clinicians to adjust their
own datasets, making it possible to compare them against the BrainChart population.

Dr Bethlehem explained: "The NHS does millions of brain scans every
year and in most of these cases, they are assessed by radiologists or neurologists relying on their extensive expertise to judge whether there
is anything clinically relevant apparent on these scans. We hope that clinicians in future will be able to compare their data against ours
and produce a more comprehensive report adding additional objective and quantitative observations to their assessment.

"This should effectively allow the neurologist to answer the question
'this area looks atypical but atypical by how much?'. As the tool is standardised, it shouldn't matter where you have your brain scan --
you should still be able to compare it." Together with Dr Bethlehem
and Dr Seidlitz, the work was led by Cambridge researchers Dr Simon
White and Professor Ed Bullmore, and by Dr Aaron Alexander-Bloch at the University of Pennsylvania. It builds on a worldwide collective endeavour
over the last few decades to measure human brain structure with MRI,
in many different groups of people at many different ages. The team say
it would not have been possible without open access to many high quality
MRI datasets, and hope their results will contribute to further openness
and sharing of data and analytics for brain imaging science.

The research was supported by the British Academy, the Autism Centre of Excellence, the Medical Research Council, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Wellcome Trust and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical
Research Centre.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Cambridge. Original
written by Craig Brierley. The original text of this story is licensed
under a Creative_Commons License. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


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Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220406132414.htm

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