Understanding typical development is only half of the aim. Infants who have a difficult start in life, through prematurity, hypoxic-ischaemic injury or other perinatal complications, are currently assessed with tools that say little about how brain function has been affected. We want to change that.
What we've shown: functional connectivity at birth predicts later motor impairment (Linke et al, 2018); preserved function can be detected in preterm infants with brain injury even where structure is compromised (Herzmann et al, 2017 ; and the structural connectivity that organises adult prefrontal cortex is already present in neonates (Caldinelli & Cusack, submitted).
Where this is going: one of the three goals of InfantNeuroAI is to develop neuroimaging methods that can detect disrupted function after neonatal brain injury. The awake-infant paradigms and motion-correction tools on the methods page, and the computational models on the NeuroAI page, are being built with this use in mind.
Our collaborators
None of this work would be possible without our clinical collaborators at Children's Health Ireland, including Professor Eleanor Molloy, Dr Adrienne Foran, Dr Angela Byrne and Dr Ailbhe Tarrant. And we're also grateful to the Coombe and Rotunda maternity hospitals, for supporting our participant recruitmnent.
Earlier work
Earlier work, largely from the lab's time at Western University, on resting-state networks in neonates with perinatal injury, brainstem morphology and NICU outcomes, and low-cost cranial ultrasound in East Africa, is listed on the publications page.
What we've shown: functional connectivity at birth predicts later motor impairment (Linke et al, 2018); preserved function can be detected in preterm infants with brain injury even where structure is compromised (Herzmann et al, 2017 ; and the structural connectivity that organises adult prefrontal cortex is already present in neonates (Caldinelli & Cusack, submitted).
Where this is going: one of the three goals of InfantNeuroAI is to develop neuroimaging methods that can detect disrupted function after neonatal brain injury. The awake-infant paradigms and motion-correction tools on the methods page, and the computational models on the NeuroAI page, are being built with this use in mind.
Our collaborators
None of this work would be possible without our clinical collaborators at Children's Health Ireland, including Professor Eleanor Molloy, Dr Adrienne Foran, Dr Angela Byrne and Dr Ailbhe Tarrant. And we're also grateful to the Coombe and Rotunda maternity hospitals, for supporting our participant recruitmnent.
Earlier work
Earlier work, largely from the lab's time at Western University, on resting-state networks in neonates with perinatal injury, brainstem morphology and NICU outcomes, and low-cost cranial ultrasound in East Africa, is listed on the publications page.
