Altered cerebral cortical microstructure in preterm infants at term-equivalent age relative to term-born neonates

摘要

Preterm birth is associated with abnormal brain structure.However,the underlying microstructural properties of cerebral cortical differences in infants born very preterm(VPT,<32 GW)and moderately-late preterm(MLPT,32-37 GW)at term-equivalent age(TEA)relative to full-term(FT)neonates were rarely explored.To achieve this,we use neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging(NODDI)and the method of gray matter-based spatial statistics(GBSS).33 VPT infants,40 MLPT infants)and 69 FT neonates with no evidence of local lesions on conventional MRI adopted from dHCP database were included in this study.By extracting the core voxels of cerebral cortex from the 142 individuals in the standard space,we compared the differences between preterm groups and FT group voxel-wisely.