Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience Systems Neuroscience

Abstract

exhibit white matter (WM) injury on clinical MRI scans, not all do, and it often isn't until later school age that cognitive deficits become evident (Anderson and Doyle, 2003). Because earlier treatment is generally more effective for neurocognitive problems associated with prematurity, a method of more accurately identifying those children at risk for developmental delay would be of tremendous clinical benefit. Recent advances in neuroimaging offer an opportunity to better characterize the effects of prematurity on brain structure. High resolution imaging identifies regional brain volumes that may be more sensitive to the effects of prematurity than overall structure and diffusion tensor imaging suggests that fractional anisotropy identifies WM abnormalities not apparent on standard MRI scans (Miller et al., 2002; Anjari et al., 2007). In a recent review of neu-roimaging in prematurity, 16 studies using diffusion tensor imaging and 10 high resolution structural studies were identified (Ment et al., 2009). However the effect of prematurity on brain function has been less well studied. This report focuses on one aspect of brain function, resting-state networks that are related to functional networks and can be obtained in sleeping children. Only several studies have examined the RSNs in infants. In two studies Fransson et al. have presented results on the presence of RSNs. In the first study (Fransson et al., 2007) 12 pre-term infants were imaged 41-weeks gestational age and in the second, 19 term unsedated infants (Fransson et al., 2009) were studied. In both