First Images Of Infant Brain Connectivity In The Womb Made

 Neuroscience  

A newly released fMRI movie, produced by Moriah Thomason from Wayne State University, shows a fly-through of several fetuses in their third trimester. By comparing the scans at slightly different stages of development, Thomason and team was able to pinpoint when different connections in the developing brain are formed.

The brains of unborn babies have now been imaged in action, showing how connections form.

The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) movie above, produced by Moriah Thomason from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, shows a fly-through of several fetuses in their third trimester. By comparing the scans at slightly different stages of development, Thomason was able to pinpoint when the brain's different parts are connected.

Thomason's team's work has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

We know little about how the fetal brain grows and functions – not only because it is so small, says Thomason also because "a fetus is doing backflips as we scan it", making it tricky to get a usable result.

Undeterred, Thomason's team made a series of fMRI scans of the brains of 25 fetuses between 24 and 38 weeks old. Each scan lasted just over 10 minutes, and the team kept only the images taken when the fetus was relatively still.

The researchers used the scans to look at two well-understood features of the developing brain: the spacing of neural connections and the time at which they developed. As expected, the two halves of the fetal brain formed denser and more numerous connections between themselves from one week to the next. The connections tended to begin in the middle of the brain and spread outward as the brain continued to develop.

By identifying how brain connectome develops in the womb, the scans could potentially help diagnose and treat conditions like schizophrenia and autism before birth.


SOURCE  New Scientist

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