AUTHOR=Sun Hui-miao , Li Qian-yun , Xiao Ru-yi , Zhang Ze-dong , Yang Xiao-yan , Yang Jie , Jin Bo , Wen Jia-xiang , Wu Yan-jun , Yang Hong , Wang Fan 

TITLE=A structural MRI study of global developmental delay in infants (<2 years old)

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neurology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3389/fneur.2022.952405

DOI=10.3389/fneur.2022.952405

ISSN=1664-2295

ABSTRACT=Objective: To use structural magnetic resonance (3D-MRI) imaging to evaluate the abnormal development of the cerebral cortex in children with global developmental delay (GDD). Methods: The GDD group includes 67 infants (age: 112 to 699 days) with global developmental delay, who underwent T1-weighted MRI scans in Shanxi Children's Hospital from December 2019 to March 2022. The healthy control (HC) group includes 135 normal developing infants (age: 88 days to 725 days) in Shanxi Children's Hospital from September 2020 to August 2021. Whole-brain T1-weighted MRI scans (3.0T), then processed using InfantSurfer to perform MR image processing and cortical surface reconstruction. Two morphological features of the cortical surface were computed, i.e., the cortical thickness (CT) and cortical surface area (SA), of the 68 brain regions, which compared between the GDD and HC groups.Results: Regarding to the CT, the HC group showed a rapid decrease at first and then a slow increase after birth, and the CT of the GDD group decreased slowly and then keep relatively stable. The GDD group showed bilaterally higher hemispherical average CT than those in the HC group. In detail, for the left hemisphere, the CT of 26 brain regions in the GDD group were higher than those of the HC group(p<0.05), except that in the entorhinal and temporal poles, the average CT values of the two brain regions were lower than those of the HC group. For the right hemisphere, the CT of the entorhinal in the GDD group was lower than that in the HC group. Otherwise, the CT of the rest 28 brain regions was higher than those in the HC group (p<0.05). In regard to the SA, both groups showed a rapid increase after birth till 23 months, and remain quite stable afterward. The GDD group shows lower SA bilaterally than that in the HC group. In detail, SA in the GDD group was lower in most cortical regions of both hemispheres than in the HC group(p<0.05), except for the right temporal pole and entorhinal. We find that contrast to the HC group,  only a few cortical regions in the GDD group showed asymmetry.