Through the use of state-of-the-art MR imaging, researchers have recorded a “huge advance” in understanding brain development, experts announced Wednesday.

Multi-shell motion-corrected diffusion-weighted MRI revealed that different white matter tracts in the brain mature at various rates and along distinct trajectories. Clinicians can use this insight to compare their patient's progress against normal brain development and pinpoint the best timeframe for treating diseases, particularly among preterm infants.

The findings were published May 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and come by way of the Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), which aims to develop the first 4-dimensional connectome of early life.

"The study is the culmination of five years' work on the dHCP to build towards a point where we can get really robust diffusion MRI data from this incredibly challenging population, and so represents a landmark for providing in-vivo visualization of how white matter first develops in the human brain," Tomoki Arichi, PhD, with the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King's College London, said on Thursday.

Arichi and co-investigators used the MRI approach to study more than 120 healthy fetuses across the second and third trimesters. The diffusion data reveals more detailed information about the location, shape, and structure of white matter development than any other resource, making it the most advanced publicly available fetal MRI dataset to come out of the project.

Bottom line: this study represents a “huge advance” in what is known about white matter in the human brain, Arichi explained.

"The applications of the findings are exciting because we can now compare these normal developmental trajectories to those from other large existing cohorts with abnormalities such as babies born preterm,” the imaging expert added later.

Click here to read the entire study.