How big is the human brain? How does it change across the lifespan? A study I co-led w/ sheds light on open fundamental questions in neuroscience & 200+ co-authors/consortia! 🧠📈📉 Thread👇
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We don’t have the ability or resources to scan someone across a lifetime. But millions of brain scans are done each year in research and clinical settings, how can we use (some of) this data? TL;DR explore our online tool and resource brainchart.io
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And brain scanners aren’t in pediatric clinics (yet), but if they were, what would we measure? How “should” the brain look? What are the milestones to reach? Unlike height/weight we don’t have a universal standard to anchor brain metrics…
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But we can use proven statistical frameworks to help stitch datasets together, which is what we did here across >100,000 people (>125,000 brain scans) from over 100 studies. Some scans dated back to 1990!
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Taken together, since each brain tissue matures at different rates, we can map new milestones when the underlying distribution of tissues change most. For example the period right after birth when grey matter grows much faster than white matter (grey/white differentiation).
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Converting brain features into (per)centile scores allows for assessment across metrics, the creation of combined metrics, and comparison of patient groups that are generally diagnosed at different ages. Amazing to compare within and across clinically diverse conditions!
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What’s really cool is that we can leverage our massive combined dataset to provide tools for converting brain tissue quantities into percentile scores for other existing and new cohorts, which we call "out-of-sample" tools, available to use now!
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We also did an extensive set of supplemental analyses to test robustness against manual ratings and automated measures of image quality, other imaging modalities, and a range of additional clinical conditions. Check out some of our ~200 pages of the supplemental information!
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And compared to traditional growth charts, we can constantly update our models with more demographically representative datasets, so reach out to me or if you’d like to contribute!
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Thanks to and other funders of the co-authors, as well as our extremely helpful reviewers/editors, open science resources, and the participants in each of the studies!
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