, are now dealing with so much information that they must also come up with new methods to comprehend it. Developing new analysis tools has become as important as using them to understand brain health and development.
A team including researchers at the University of Washington recently used new software to compare MRIs from 300 babies and discovered that myelin, a part of the brain's so-called white matter, develops much slower after birth. The researchersUW News spoke with senior author Ariel Rokem, a UW research associate professor in the psychology department and a data science fellow in the eScience Institute, about the paper and his research approach.
We know from other studies that abnormal myelin development is associated with many developmental and mental health disorders, from. But before this study we still didn't know how birth changes the course of myelin development. We had several hypotheses that we wanted to test. One is, well, that it doesn't matter when exactly you were born; it just matters how much time passed from conception to when you're scanned. Another was that it matters only how long after conception you were born, and it didn't matter how long after birth you were scanned.
We found that the data supports that both the gestational age at birth and the gestational age at time of scan mattered, but there's an inflection point right at birth. Right then, development of these bundles that we were looking at slows down dramatically. It's a basic fact, but we didn't know this until now, and we found it by examining publicly available data.