Quantifying regional growth patterns through longitudinal analysis of distances between multimodal MR intensity distributions

Quantitative analysis of early brain development through imaging is critical for identifying pathological development, which may in turn affect treatment procedures. We propose a framework for analyzing spatiotemporal patterns of brain maturation by quantifying intensity changes in longitudinal MR images. We use a measure of divergence between a pair of intensity distributions to study the changes that occur within specific regions, as well as between a pair of anatomical regions, over time. The change within a specific region is measured as the contrast between white matter and gray matter tissue belonging to that region. The change between a pair of regions is measured as the divergence between regional image appearances, summed over all tissue classes. We use kernel regression to integrate the temporal information across different subjects in a consistent manner. We applied our method on multimodal MRI data with T1-weighted (T1W) and T2-weighted (T2W) scans of each subject at the approximate ages of 6 months, 12 months, and 24 months. The results demonstrate that brain maturation begins at posterior regions and that frontal regions develop later, which matches previously published histological, qualitative and morphometric studies. Our multimodal analysis also confirms that T1W and T2W modalities capture different properties of the maturation process, a phenomena referred to as T2 time lag compared to T1. The proposed method has potential for analyzing regional growth patterns across different populations and for isolating specific critical maturation phases in different MR modalities.