China Autism Brain Imaging Consortium: Charting Brain Growth in Chinese Children with Autism
Poster No:
355
Submission Type:
Late-Breaking Abstract Submission
Authors:
Xujun Duan1, Lei Li1, China Autism Brain Imaging Consortium1
Institutions:
1University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
China Autism Brain Imaging Consortium
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu, Sichuan
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Chengdu, Sichuan
Introduction:
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition with lifelong effects, often marked by atypical brain growth patterns [1]. The condition manifests in various behavioral, cognitive, and social difficulties, often becoming apparent in early childhood. Despite significant advances in neuroimaging and large-sample datasets like the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE), most research in ASD has focused on adolescents and adults, leaving early childhood brain development-which is crucial for early diagnosis and intervention-largely unexplored [2]. Furthermore, much of the existing research on ASD has been based on Western, particularly Caucasian, samples. This narrow focus limits the generalizability of findings and fails to account for the neurodevelopmental diversity observed in non-Caucasian populations. This study aims to bridge these gaps by introducing the China Autism Brain Imaging Consortium (CABIC), a large-scale initiative that aggregates multi-site structural MRI datasets and phenotypic data from autistic children in China.
Methods:
The CABIC is a collaborative effort between research institutions across China, aimed at creating a comprehensive database of neuroimaging and behavioral data on autistic children. We aggregated structural MRI data from 1,451 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 1,119 typically developing children (TDC) across various age groups ranging from 1.0 to 12.92 years old. The MRI scans were segmented using a standardized automated pipeline based on FreeSurfer (version 6.0) to obtain general morphological measurements of different brain tissues from aseg.stats and lh/rh.aparc.stats. These morphometric phenotypes included total gray matter volume (GMV), subcortical gray matter volume (sGMV), cerebral white matter volume (WMV), mean cortical thickness (MT), and surface area (SA). Then ComBat with a generalized additive model (GAM) was employed for harmonization between different sites. While the World Health Organization provides guidelines for anthropometric growth chart modeling with generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape (GAMLSS), the Lifespan Brain Chart Consortium (LBCC) recently reported that the generalized gamma distribution offered the best fit for brain morphometry measures [3]. Consequently, the same GAMLSS with generalized gamma distributions was applied for the trajectories in the current study across all evaluated models. These charts were used to track the trajectory of brain development in both autistic children and TDC over time.
Results:
The growth curves of global morphometric phenotypes of ASD constructed from the CABIC data showed an initial increase in early childhood, followed by an accelerated decline to meet the TDC curves, and subsequently continued to decline atypically into adolescence [4] (Figure 1). Developmental shift milestones mark the developmental shifted points from over to delayed maturation in autistic children compared to typically developing children. The comparison between the CABIC dataset and the ABIDE, an existing large-scale dataset primarily composed of Western participants, revealed marked differences in the developmental trajectories of autistic children from the two dataset (Figure 2). These differences highlight the role that ethnicity and culture may play in shaping the neurodevelopmental processes underlying ASD.
Conclusions:
By providing the first large-scale dataset of neuroimaging for autistic children in China, CABIC offers an invaluable opportunity to explore the neurodevelopmental trajectories of ASD in a culturally and ethnically diverse context.
Disorders of the Nervous System:
Neurodevelopmental/ Early Life (eg. ADHD, autism) 1
Lifespan Development:
Early life, Adolescence, Aging
Neuroinformatics and Data Sharing:
Databasing and Data Sharing 2
Keywords:
Autism
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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·Figure2
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2. Di Martino, A., et al., The autism brain imaging data exchange: towards a large-scale evaluation of the intrinsic brain architecture in autism. Molecular psychiatry, 2014. 19(6): p. 659-667.
3. Bethlehem, R.A., et al., Brain charts for the human lifespan. Nature, 2022. 604(7906): p. 525-533.
4. Courchesne, E., Brain development in autism: early overgrowth followed by premature arrest of growth. Mental retardation and developmental disabilities research reviews, 2004. 10(2): p. 106-111.