High-dimensional normative models of the cerebellum

Background

For years, growth charts have been widely used in health systems to track the growth and development of children, for example height and weight. These charts have been instrumental in monitoring children’s growth, and alerting clinicians and caregivers to potential issues at an early stage. Recently, the concept of growth charts for brain imaging data have been increasingly investigated, and new, novel technical developments allow for the methods to be applied across diverse data from multiple sites.

Growth models of the cerebellum

The cerebellum, a tree-shaped structure in the back and base of the brain, is also known as the “small brain”. Despite its relatively small size, the cerebellum accounts for more than half of the total neural architecture in the brain. It is also responsible for a wide-array of crucial functions ranging from motor ability to higher-order cognition. Growth models of the human cerebellum allow clinicians to track how their patients compare to normative estimates over time, thereby allowing them to track disease progression, treatment response, and more.

The project

This international collaborative project will develop:

• a.)  a cutting-edge cerebellar image analysis pipeline which can be applied to a diverse set of research and clinical data,

• b.) leverage these data to construct high-dimensional normative models for the lifespan which can be applied to data from around the world.

Aims

This project aims to implement a cerebellar processing pipeline and normative model framework with wide eventual clinical applications. The models and framework with be developed on over 80,000 datasets, and various validations of the model will be conducted using clinical and population-based data.

Raynor Cerebellum Project (RCP)

Internal collaborations

• Department of Neuroscience

External collaborations

• University of Western Ontario

• Radboud University

• Ryan Muetzel
  r.muetzel@erasmusmc.nl

• Bing Xu

• Carolin Gaiser

• Maarten Frens

• Jörn Diedrichsen

• Andre Marquand