Functional and diffusion MRI reveal the neurophysiological basis of neonates’ noxious-stimulus evoked brain activity

Baxter, Luke; Moultrie, Fiona; Fitzgibbon, Sean; Aspbury, Marianne; Mansfield, Roshni; Bastiani, Matteo; Rogers, Richard; Jbabdi, Saad; Duff, Eugene; Slater, Rebeccah

Abstract

Understanding the neurophysiology underlying pain perception in infants is central to improving early life pain management. In this multimodal MRI study, we use resting-state functional and white matter diffusion MRI to investigate individual variability in infants’ noxious-evoked brain activity. In an 18-infant nociception-paradigm dataset, we show it is possible to predict infants’ cerebral haemodynamic responses to experimental noxious stimulation using their resting-state activity across nine networks from a separate stimulus-free scan. In an independent 215-infant Developing Human Connectome Project dataset, we use this resting-state-based prediction model to generate noxious responses. We identify a significant correlation between these predicted noxious responses and infants’ white matter mean diffusivity, and this relationship is subsequently confirmed within our nociception-paradigm dataset. These findings reveal that a newborn infant’s pain-related brain activity is tightly coupled to both their spontaneous resting-state activity and underlying white matter microstructure. This work provides proof-of-concept that knowledge of an infant’s functional and structural brain architecture could be used to predict pain responses, informing infant pain management strategies and facilitating evidence-based personalisation of care.

Citation

Baxter, L., Moultrie, F., Fitzgibbon, S., Aspbury, M., Mansfield, R., Bastiani, M., …Slater, R. (2021). Functional and diffusion MRI reveal the neurophysiological basis of neonates’ noxious-stimulus evoked brain activity. Nature Communications, 12, Article 2744. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22960-0

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 5, 2021
• Online Publication Date: May 12, 2021
• Publication Date: May 12, 2021
• Deposit Date: Mar 3, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: May 19, 2021
• Journal: Nature Communications
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Article Number: 2744
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22960-0
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5365306
• Publisher URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22960-0