Virendra
Mishra1, Hua Cheng2, Gaolang Gong3, Yan
Daniel Zhao4, Yong He3, Qi Dong3, Hao Huang1
1Advanced Imaging Research Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States; 2Imaging Center, Beijing Children's Hospital, Beijing, China; 3State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; 4Clinical Sciences, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, United States
While the general increase of fractional anisotropy and general decrease of mean, axial and radial diffusivity of white matter during development are commonly found in the literature, how microstructural correlations of major white matter tracts change during development remains unclear. In this study, we hypothesized that the microstructural correlations of different white matter tracts undergo significant change in terms of correlation strength maps and the microstructural correlation pattern represented by dendrograms is reshuffled during brain development. Tract-level measurements and inter-tract correlation analysis of the four DTI metrics of 10 tracts from 26 neonates and 28 adolescents were conducted.