Do Baby Brain Cortices that Look Alike at Birth Grow Alike During the First Year of Postnatal Development?

The neonatal brain cortex is marked with complex and high-convoluted morphology, that undergoes dramatic changes over the first year of postnatal development. A large body of existing research works investigating ‘the developing brain’ have focused on looking at changes in cortical morphology and charting the developmental trajectories of the cortex. However, the relationship between neonatal cortical morphology and its postnatal growth trajectory was poorly investigated. Notably, understanding the multi-scale shape-growth relationship may help identify early neurodevelopmental disorders that affect it. Here, we unprecedentedly explore the question: “Do cortices that look alike in shape at birth have similar kinetic growth patterns?”. To this aim, we propose to analyze shape-growth relationship at three different scales. On a global scale, we found that neonatal cortices similar in geometric closeness are significantly correlated with their postnatal overall growth dynamics from birth till 1-year-old (r= 0.27). This finding was replicated when using shape similarity in morphology (r= 0.20). On a local scale, for both hemispheres, 20% of cortical regions displayed a significant high correlation (r> 0.4) between their similarities in morphology and dynamics. On a connectional scale, we identified hubs of cortical regions that were consistently similar in morphology and developed similarly across subjects including the cingulate cortex using a novel integral shape-growth brain graph representation.