A new framework for analyzing white matter maturation in early brain development

The trajectory of early brain development is marked by rapid growth presented by volume but also by tissue property changes. Capturing regional characteristics of axonal structuring and myelination via neuroimaging requires analysis of longitudinal image data with multiple modalities. Complementary to earlier studies of volume and cortical folding analysis, this paper focuses on white matter tissue changes as seen in multimodal MRI and DTI. We propose a new framework for analyzing early maturation in white matter that generates a normative spatiotemporal model and provides 3D maps of absolute and relative indices of maturation. The method, using a continuous model of intensity changes using modified Legendre polynomials, has been applied to a multimodal dataset (T1W, T2W, PD, DTI) with 8 subjects that have been scanned at approximately 2 weeks, 1 year, and 2 years. We demonstrate that spatial maturation maps generated from different modalities capture different properties of white matter growth which might lead to a better understanding of the underlying neurobiology.