PURPOSE: Extremely low gestation age newborns (ELGANs) are at high risk for developmental brain abnormalities. This study is to determine deep and superficial gray matter volumetric abnormalities of ELGAN children and full term children at 9 to 11 years of age.
METHODS: High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans were obtained from 160 ELGAN children (70 males and 90 females) and 30 full term children (15 males and 15 females) using a dual-echo turbo spin-echo (DE-TSE) pulse sequence at 3.0T (or 1.5T at only one site). The DICOM MR images were processed with quantitative MRI algorithms programmed in Mathcad. The brain deep gray matter (dGM) was manually segmented; dGM and cortical gray matter (cGM) volumes were quantified using semi-automated clustering segmentation algorithms.
RESULTS: ELGAN children had smaller deep gray matter volume (41.86 ± 7.42 ml) than full term children (49.24 ± 10.91 ml). Deep gray matter volumes of ELGAN children showed similar distribution range (SD = 7.42 ml) with the full term children (SD = 10.91 ml). About 83% of the ELGAN children had smaller deep gray matter volumes compared to the average volume of full term children at the same ages. Male children had smaller deep gray matter volumes in ELGAN (42.77 ± 7.09 ml) than in full term (51.74 ± 9.76 ml), but female children had similar deep gray matter volumes in ELGAN (41.14 ± 7.62 ml) with full term (44.27 ± 7.56 ml). Additionally, smaller deep gray matter volumes were observed more often in males (90%) than in females (65%). Cortical gray matter volumes of ELGAN children distributed from 345.60 to 1177.50ml. Moreover, female ELGAN children had smaller cortical gray matter volumes (828.14 ± 147.61 ml) than males (883.13 ± 151.34 ml). Correlation analysis revealed a positive correlation between cerebral deep gray matter volumes and total gray matter volumes (total: r = 0.57, p<0.0001; male: r = 0.542, p < 0.0001; female: r = 0.587, p < 0.0001).
CONCLUSION: Male ELGAN children had smaller brain deep gray matter volumes than full term children at ages of 9 to 11 years, but not females. Cortical gray matter volumes of female ELGAN were smaller than male ELGAN. Smaller deep gray matter volumes were associated with smaller total gray matter volumes in ELGAN children.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/20784 |
| Date | 09 March 2017 |
| Creators | Shao, Di |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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