Development of brain atlases for early-to-middle adolescent collision-sport athletes

Sci Rep. 2021 Mar 19;11(1):6440. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-85518-6.

Abstract

Human brains develop across the life span and largely vary in morphology. Adolescent collision-sport athletes undergo repetitive head impacts over years of practices and competitions, and therefore may exhibit a neuroanatomical trajectory different from healthy adolescents in general. However, an unbiased brain atlas targeting these individuals does not exist. Although standardized brain atlases facilitate spatial normalization and voxel-wise analysis at the group level, when the underlying neuroanatomy does not represent the study population, greater biases and errors can be introduced during spatial normalization, confounding subsequent voxel-wise analysis and statistical findings. In this work, targeting early-to-middle adolescent (EMA, ages 13-19) collision-sport athletes, we developed population-specific brain atlases that include templates (T1-weighted and diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging) and semantic labels (cortical and white matter parcellations). Compared to standardized adult or age-appropriate templates, our templates better characterized the neuroanatomy of the EMA collision-sport athletes, reduced biases introduced during spatial normalization, and exhibited higher sensitivity in diffusion tensor imaging analysis. In summary, these results suggest the population-specific brain atlases are more appropriate towards reproducible and meaningful statistical results, which better clarify mechanisms of traumatic brain injury and monitor brain health for EMA collision-sport athletes.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Athletes*
  • Athletic Injuries / epidemiology
  • Atlases as Topic*
  • Brain / anatomy & histology
  • Brain / diagnostic imaging*
  • Brain / growth & development
  • Brain Concussion / epidemiology
  • Diffusion Tensor Imaging / methods*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Young Adult