ArticleCommunications biology2023
Maturational networks of human fetal brain activity reveal emerging connectivity patterns prior to ex-utero exposure.
Article in Communications biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Associations between chronic placental inflammation, fetal brain development and later autism traits.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 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
- The Development of Lateralized Brain Oscillations in Infants: Lessons From Autism.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Edge participation coefficient unveiling the developmental dynamics of neonatal functional connectome.Communications biology · 2025Article
- A hierarchical model of early brain functional network development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Emergence of a synergistic scaffold in the brains of human infants.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The developing Human Connectome Project fetal functional MRI release: Methods and data structures.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Development of the basic architecture of neocortical circuitry in the human fetus as revealed by the coupling spatiotemporal pattern of synaptogenesis along with microstructure and macroscale in vivo MR imaging.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Trajectories of human brain functional connectome maturation across the birth transition.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Functional structure of local connections and differentiation of cerebral cortex areas in the neonate.NeuroImage · 2024Article
- Advances in Fetal Brain Imaging.Magnetic resonance imaging clinics of North America · 2024Review
- Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Characterizing Large-Scale Human Circuit Development with In Vivo Neuroimaging.Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in biology · 2024Review
- Developmental trajectories of the default mode, frontoparietal, and salience networks from the third trimester through the newborn period.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Article
- The Inverted U: Exploring the Interconnectedness of Movement and Cognitive Function Across the Lifespan.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
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Authors and funding
16 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
A key feature of the fetal period is the rapid emergence of organised patterns of spontaneous brain activity. However, characterising this process in utero using functional MRI is inherently challenging and requires analytical methods which can capture the constituent developmental transformations. Here, we introduce a novel analytical framework, termed "maturational networks" (matnets), that achieves this by modelling functional networks as an emerging property of the developing brain. Compared to standard network analysis methods that assume consistent patterns of connectivity across development, our method incorporates age-related changes in connectivity directly into network estimation. We test its performance in a large neonatal sample, finding that the matnets approach characterises adult-like features of functional network architecture with a greater specificity than a standard group-ICA approach; for example, our approach is able to identify a nearly complete default mode network. In the in-utero brain, matnets enables us to reveal the richness of emerging functional connections and the hierarchy of their maturational relationships with remarkable anatomical specificity. We show that the associative areas play a central role within prenatal functional architecture, therefore indicating that functional connections of high-level associative areas start emerging prior to exposure to the extra-utero environment.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.