Structural & DTI analysis group: active projects
List of Projects (status August 2024)
Title: Clinical Translational Research Center on Neurodevelopmental Disorders: This project is an interdisciplinary program with the overarching goal of supporting and promoting research relevant to understanding the pathogenesis and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders. NICHD
Title: The Developmental Role of Individual Differences in Adolescent Brain Structure and Risk: The UNC Early Brain Development Study is a longitudinal study that has followed children with imaging and developmental assessments from birth to age 10 years. This project will continue to study brain structure and function in these children at 12, 14, and 16 years with MRI to see if we can identify childhood predictors of behavior in adolescence that is considered at risk for psychiatric illness, which will ultimately help target periods of childhood development for early intervention. NIMH
Title: Parsing Early Emerging Heterogeneity Related to Autism Spectrum Disorder: The goal of this project is to measure variation in behavior and brain functioning in this age that may predict differing clinical outcomes. Identifying different subtypes of risk will later help us develop individually-optimized clinical recommendations for children with autism and related disorders. NIMH / University of Minnesota
Title: MRI Based Presymptomatic Prediction of ASD: This project is a longitudinal study of infants at high risk for autism. Data from this study will be examined alongside data collected from a previous study of infants at high-risk for autism (the ACE Network. NIMH / Washington University at St. Louis
Title: A Longitudinal Brain and Behavior Study of Autism from Infancy through Adolescence: This ACE Network proposal aims to examine 400 children (300 infants at high familial risk (HR) and 100 at low risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD)), who have been previously examined at a number of time points from infancy through school age, using detailed brain imaging and behavior assessments, and who are now proposed for re-assessment in adolescence. The main goals of this proposal are to characterize brain and brain-behavior development in ASD, from infancy through adolescence; identify infant-to-school age brain and behavior features that predict the varied, clinically-relevant outcomes in adolescence that are associated with familial risk for ASD; and to take a novel approach to defining ASD in adolescent females that will have
more relevance for biological studies than current definitions, identify early childhood markers of ASD in adolescent females (who are often not detected earlier in childhood); and, characterize infant-to-adolescent brain development in ASD females. NICHD
Title: A Longitudinal MRI Study Characterizing Very Early Brain Development in Infants With Down Syndrome: The aims of this proposal are: 1) Define the longitudinal characteristics of early brain development in infants (3 to 24 months) with DS in comparison to TYP infants and infants with other developmental disabilities (ASD and Fragile X) using three different types of neuroimaging (MRI, DTI, rsfMRI); 2) Develop predictive models for developmental outcomes in infants with DS based on longitudinal structural or functional MRI characteristics; and 3) Characterize brain-behavior correlates with coordinated multimodal imaging in infancy characterizing the interrelationship between longitudinal network imaging parameters and cognitive, behavioral and neurodevelopmental outcomes using sophisticated multivariate support vector machine (SVM) analytic strategies. 120 infants with DS and 40 TYP control infants will be followed longitudinally from 3 to 24 months. NICHD / Washington University at St. Louis
Title: Development of brain structure supporting face learning in infants at risk for autism: This study will advance our understanding of how early brain development associated with visual face learning in the first two years of life relates to social ability in autism. In Aim I, we will characterize its typical longitudinal development, and in Aim II, we will test for group differences in its structure and the developmental trajectory of its growth and predictive association of its structure with clinical measures of social communication and socialization. The outcome of this project will shed light on the developmental timing of early visual experience related to social skills development, and has the potential to lead to a novel biomarker reflecting early face learning ability that could provide a new target for early intervention approaches. NIMH / Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Title: Genetic Influences on Infant Brain Development: Understanding the Developmental Origins of Mental Illness: The primary goal of the current application is to determine how genetic and environmental factors influence brain development, cognitive ability, and behavior from birth to 6 years of age; a period of life which is thought to be especially important for psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD. NIMH / Michigan State University
Title: Early Risk Factors of Accelerated Neural Aging Trajectories and Cognitive Decline: A Nonhuman Primate Longitudinal Model: Longitudinal nonhuman primate (NHP) studies could provide significant information on early biological and neural markers of ELA-related cognitive decline due to their long life span and gradual aging-related cognitive impairments and brain pathology similar to those in humans emerging in middle age. This proposal builds on our data linking ELA in macaques with early markers of accelerated cellular aging (accelerated DNA methylation age, shortened telomere length), inflammation, and neurocognitive alterations detectable from infancy to young adulthood. The goal is to use a prospective, longitudinal design in NHPs to identify early biomarkers/pathways and underlying mechanisms of ELA-related accelerated neural aging trajectories and cognitive decline from young adulthood to middle age: NIH / Emory University
Title: UC Davis Conte Center: Neuroimmune Mechanisms of Psychiatric Disorders: The goal of this center to investigate the novel hypothesis that an origin of schizophrenia could be dysregulation of immune molecules that play a key role in the normal development and functioning of connections in the brain. NIMH / UC Davis
Title: Shape Analysis Toolbox: From Medical Images to Quantitative Insights of Anatomy: The Shape AnaLysis Toolbox (SALT) was created to be a dissemination vehicle for advanced shape modeling and analysis methodology as an open-source, comprehensive and freely distributed software. This renewal will allow for novel enhancements to our methods and our dissemination model in order to continue maximizing the success of SALT. The ultimate goal of SlicerSALT is to maximize the potential benefits of the geometric information contained in medical data and to expand its use beyond simple visualization to support clinical research. NIH / Kitware, Inc.
Title: Exploratory Analysis Tools for Developmental Studies of Brain Microstructure with Diffusion MRI
Major Goals: This project aims to accelerate adolescent mental health research by developing software tools that enable rapid exploratory analysis of white matter microstructure development from longitudinal diffusion MRI (DMRI) datasets. NIH / Kitware, Inc.
Title: The Development of Gut Microbiota and Behavioral Inhibition in Childhood: The Role of Early Stress and Brain Development: The proposed study will examine the influence of psychosocial stress on the development of gut microbiota, mediated by chronic HPA axis activation, as well as the bidirectional relationship between the developing microbiome and behavioral inhibition across the first four years of life. We will measure alterations in brain development across this time as a mediator of the relationship between the microbiome and behavioral inhibition. NIMH
Title: Marrow Adipose Compartment Physiology in Caloric Restriction and Aging: Age and body mass index are among the most significant clinical determinants of fracture risk. We propose a distinct bone-fat phenotype in osteoporotic conditions (calorie restriction and aging) and ask how this phenotype supports or harms bone quality. Exercise, a known regulator of bone and bone-fat, will be applied to investigate bone-fat in these states. NIH
Title: Mapping Neurocognitive Complications of Pediatric Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) and Potential Risk and Protective Factors: Our multidisciplinary team of neuroimaging experts and endocrinologists will examine brain and cognitive alterations in children with T1DM across three aims: Aim 1: Measure the differential impact of age of T1DM diagnosis on brain structure, micro-organization, metabolism and function and mental health. Aim 2: Identify biological and psychosocial moderators and Risk and Resilience factors. We will evaluate the impact of both biological stressors and psychosocial determinants of health (e.g. SES, Education, ACE scores, rurality, race, etc ) on neurocognitive function and maturation in children with T1DM. Finally in Aim 3 we will develop a recruitment, retention and dissemination strategy to prepare for future clinical trials that build a precision risk- and resilience-prediction model. NIH