ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Development of human white matter pathways in utero over the second and third trimester.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 papers.
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Who cites it
74 citing papers in PubMed, 117 citations in OpenAlex.
- Real-Time Targeted Slice Reacquisition for Motion-Corrupted Fetal Diffusion MRI.Magnetic resonance in medicine · 2026Article
- Insights into temporal and spatial dynamics of short association fiber formation in the human fetal brain.Science advances · 2026Article
- Gene dosage effects of 22q11.2 copy number variants on in-vivo measures of white matter axonal density and dispersion.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Associations between neonatal brain structure and neurodevelopmental outcomes following very preterm birth.Journal of perinatology : official journal of the California Perinatal Association · 2026Article
- Association of borderline hypertension defined by ACC-AHA diagnostic criteria during pregnancy with neurodevelopment in infants.BMC medicine · 2026Article
- Developmental human brain connectome from fetal stage to early childhood.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- The Fronto-Temporal Cortex Has Increased Subcortical Connectivity In Utero and Plasticity in Adulthood.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Aperiodic parameters of the fMRI power spectrum associate with preterm birth and neonatal age.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Prenatal Exposure to Tobacco Smoke and Vaping Aerosols: Mechanisms Disrupting White-Matter Formation.Toxics · 2025Review
- Transcriptomic divergence of network hubs in the prenatal human brain.Communications biology · 2025Article
- HERON: High-Efficiency Real-Time Motion Quantification and Re-Acquisition for Fetal Diffusion MRI.IEEE transactions on medical imaging · 2025Article
- Review
- Gut Microbiota and Neurodevelopment in Preterm Infants: Mechanistic Insights and Prospects for Clinical Translation.Microorganisms · 2025Review
- Ferreting Out the Effects of Neonatal Hypoxia-Ischemia and Sex on Ferret Cortical Gyrification.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Early life stress impairs hippocampal subfield myelination.Communications biology · 2025Article
- FetDTIAlign: A deep learning framework for affine and deformable registration of fetal brain dMRI.NeuroImage · 2025Article
- Early Development and Co-Evolution of Microstructural and Functional Brain Connectomes: A Multi-Modal MRI Study in Preterm and Full-Term Infants.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- From Circuits to Lifespan: Translating Mouse and Human Timelines with Neuroimaging-Based Tractography.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Higher prenatal dietary glycemic index in the third trimester of pregnancy is associated with infant negative affect at 6 months.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Granular cytoplasmic inclusions in astrocytes and microglial activation in the fetal brain of pigtail macaques in response to maternal viral infection.Acta neuropathologica communications · 2025Article
14 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
16 authors at 1 institution in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
During the second and third trimesters of human gestation, rapid neurodevelopment is underpinned by fundamental processes including neuronal migration, cellular organization, cortical layering, and myelination. In this time, white matter growth and maturation lay the foundation for an efficient network of structural connections. Detailed knowledge about this developmental trajectory in the healthy human fetal brain is limited, in part, due to the inherent challenges of acquiring high-quality MRI data from this population. Here, we use state-of-the-art high-resolution multishell motion-corrected diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI), collected as part of the developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), to characterize the in utero maturation of white matter microstructure in 113 fetuses aged 22 to 37 wk gestation. We define five major white matter bundles and characterize their microstructural features using both traditional diffusion tensor and multishell multitissue models. We found unique maturational trends in thalamocortical fibers compared with association tracts and identified different maturational trends within specific sections of the corpus callosum. While linear maturational increases in fractional anisotropy were seen in the splenium of the corpus callosum, complex nonlinear trends were seen in the majority of other white matter tracts, with an initial decrease in fractional anisotropy in early gestation followed by a later increase. The latter is of particular interest as it differs markedly from the trends previously described in ex utero preterm infants, suggesting that this normative fetal data can provide significant insights into the abnormalities in connectivity which underlie the neurodevelopmental impairments associated with preterm birth.
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