Gut microbiota maturation and early behavioral and cognitive development.

The presence of gut microbiota-brain-axis has been widely reported. However, few studies have focused on uncovering the potential associations during a time-period that our brain and gut microbiota undergo rapid maturation. We evaluated the potential associations between characteristics of gut microbiota and cognition and temperament using an accelerated longitudinal design in typically developing children over 0-3 years of age.

STF: A spherical transformer for versatile cortical surfaces applications.

Inspired by the remarkable success of attention mechanisms in various applications, there is a growing need to adapt the Transformer architecture from conventional Euclidean domains to non-Euclidean spaces commonly encountered in medical imaging. Structures such as brain cortical surfaces, represented by triangular meshes, exhibit spherical topology and present unique challenges. To address this, we propose the Spherical Transformer (STF), a versatile backbone that leverages self-attention for analyzing cortical surface data.

Redefining hysterectomy: Robotic versus conventional approaches in transvaginal natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery and laparoscopically-assisted vaginal hysterectomy.

Background: This study compares surgical outcomes of transvaginal natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (vNOTES) and laparoscopic-assisted vaginal hysterectomy (LAVH), using conventional and robotic-assisted laparoscopy, and examines factors influencing the choice of approach.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted at a tertiary-care center involving 773 patients undergoing minimally invasive hysterectomy for benign gynecologic conditions between February 2015 and July 2024. Of these, 211 underwent vNOTES (153 conventional, 58 robotic-assisted) and 562 underwent LAVH (408 conventional, 154 robotic-assisted).

Functional development of the human cerebellum from birth to age five.

Despite the cerebellum's crucial role in brain function, its early development, particularly in relation to the cerebrum, remains poorly understood. Here, we examine cerebellocortical connectivity using over 1000 high-quality resting-state functional MRI scans from children between birth and five years of age. By mapping cerebellar topography with fine temporal granularity, we unveil the hierarchical organization of cerebellocortical functional connectivity from infancy.

Advances in magnetic resonance imaging of the developing brain and its applications in pediatrics.

The human brain undergoes a complex and dynamic developmental process from birth through adolescence, driven by molecular and cellular mechanisms that shape its structure and function. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an essential non-invasive tool for studying pediatric brain development and detecting neurological disorders. However, pediatric neuroimaging presents unique challenges, including motion artifacts, small anatomical structures, and immature tissue properties, necessitating specialized MRI techniques.

Longitudinal associations between birth-to-six cortical growth and childhood neurocognitive function.

The human cortex undergoes immense change in the first years of life, doubling in thickness within the first year and evidencing the greatest change within the first 5 y. While substantial research has identified the early postnatal period as a sensitive period in cortical development, research to date lacks the temporal resolution necessary to identify which aspects of cortical change predict later neural and cognitive function. This study leveraged a rich longitudinal dataset of cortical thickness in 50 children who were scanned up to 11 times between birth and 6 y.

Disrupted host-microbiota crosstalk promotes nonalcoholic fatty liver disease progression by impaired mitophagy.

The intricate interplay between host genes and intrahepatic microbes is vital in shaping the hepatic microenvironment. This study aims to elucidate how host-microbiota interactions contribute to the progression of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Hepatic gene and microbial profiles were analyzed from 570 samples across five cohorts, including 72 control, 124 nonalcoholic fatty liver (NAFL), 143 Borderline, and 231 nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) samples.

Early life phthalate exposure impacts gray matter and white matter volume in infants and young children.

Objective: Prenatal phthalate exposure is associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, yet data on impacts of early life exposure remains limited. We investigated phthalate and replacement plasticizer exposures from 2 weeks to 7 years of age in relation to brain anatomical attributes, using serial structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI).

Material And Methods: Children were enrolled after birth into the UNC Baby Connectome Project, a longitudinal neuroimaging study (North Carolina, USA; 2017-2020).

Flexible Individualized Developmental Prediction of Infant Cortical Surface Maps via Intensive Triplet Autoencoder.

Computational methods for prediction of the dynamic and complex development of the infant cerebral cortex are critical and highly desired for a better understanding of early brain development in health and disease. Although a few methods have been proposed, they are limited to predicting cortical surface maps at predefined ages and require a large amount of strictly paired longitudinal data at these ages for model training. However, longitudinal infant images are typically acquired at highly irregular and nonuniform scanning ages, thus leading to limited training data for these methods and low flexibility and accuracy.

Charting brain functional development from birth to 6 years of age.

Early childhood is crucial for brain functional development. Using advanced neuroimaging methods, characterizing functional connectivity has shed light on the developmental process in infants. However, insights into spatiotemporal functional maturation from birth to early childhood are substantially lacking.

Predicting infant brain connectivity with federated multi-trajectory GNNs using scarce data.

The understanding of the convoluted evolution of infant brain networks during the first postnatal year is pivotal for identifying the dynamics of early brain connectivity development. Thanks to the valuable insights into the brain's anatomy, existing deep learning frameworks focused on forecasting the brain evolution trajectory from a single baseline observation. While yielding remarkable results, they suffer from three major limitations.

Surface Expansion Regionalization of the Hippocampus in Early Brain Development.

The hippocampal formation is implicated in a myriad of crucial functions, particularly centered around memory and emotion, with distinct subdivisions fulfilling specific roles. However, there is no consensus on the spatial organization of these subdivisions, given that the functional connectivity and gene expression-based parcellation along its longitudinal axis differs from the histology-based parcellation along its medial-lateral axis. The dynamic nonuniform surface expansion of the hippocampus during early development reflects the underlying changes of microstructure and functional connectivity, providing important clues on hippocampal subdivisions.

Revealing Fine-grained Genetically Informed Cortical Parcellation Maps of Neonates Based on Multi-view Spectral Clustering.

Genetic factors have been proven to be one of the major determinants in shaping the neonatal cerebral cortex. Previous research has demonstrated distinct genetic influences on the spatial patterns of cortical thickness (CT) and surface area (SA) in neonates, leading to their unique genetically informed parcellation maps. However, these parcellation maps were derived at coarse scales and only reliant on single cortical properties, making them unable to comprehensively characterize the fine-grained genetically regulated patterns of the neonatal cerebral cortex.

Early life phthalate exposure impacts gray matter and white matter volume in infants and young children.

Objective: Prenatal phthalate exposure is associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, yet data on impacts of early life exposure remains limited. We investigated phthalate and replacement plasticizer exposures from 2 weeks to 7 years of age in relation to brain anatomical attributes, using serial structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI).

Material And Methods: Children were enrolled after birth into the UNC Baby Connectome Project, a longitudinal neuroimaging study.

Development of Effective Connectome from Infancy to Adolescence.

Delineating the normative developmental profile of functional connectome is important for both standardized assessment of individual growth and early detection of diseases. However, functional connectome has been mostly studied using functional connectivity (FC), where undirected connectivity strengths are estimated from statistical correlation of resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) signals. To address this limitation, we applied regression dynamic causal modeling (rDCM) to delineate the developmental trajectories of effective connectivity (EC), the directed causal influence among neuronal populations, in whole-brain networks from infancy to adolescence (0-22 years old) based on high-quality rs-fMRI data from Baby Connectome Project (BCP) and Human Connectome Project Development (HCP-D).

Impact of aerosol-photolysis interaction on the ozone concentration in the upper boundary layer on Mountain Everest.

Previous research has revealed that, during the late afternoon, the ozone (O3) concentration tends to elevate at the northern perimeter of Mount Everest (5200 m above sea level). This increase is attributed to the natural gradient of rising O3 concentration with height, exacerbated by the corresponding downstream mountain winds. Our recent field observations corroborate this finding, showing a consistent increase in O3 concentrations by approximately 13.

A lifespan-generalizable skull-stripping model for magnetic resonance images that leverages prior knowledge from brain atlases.

In magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, an imaging-preprocessing step removes the skull and other non-brain tissue from the images. But methods for such a skull-stripping process often struggle with large data heterogeneity across medical sites and with dynamic changes in tissue contrast across lifespans. Here we report a skull-stripping model for magnetic resonance images that generalizes across lifespans by leveraging personalized priors from brain atlases.

Local Gradients of Functional Connectivity Enable Precise Fingerprinting of Infant Brains During Dynamic Development.

Brain functional connectivity patterns exhibit distinctive, individualized characteristics capable of distinguishing one individual from others, like fingerprint. Accurate and reliable depiction of individualized functional connectivity patterns during infancy is crucial for advancing our understanding of individual uniqueness and variability of the intrinsic functional architecture during dynamic early brain development, as well as its role in neurodevelopmental disorders. However, the highly dynamic and rapidly developing nature of the infant brain presents significant challenges in capturing robust and stable functional fingerprint, resulting in low accuracy in individual identification over ages during infancy using functional connectivity.

[Characteristics and Sources of Volatile Organic Compounds （VOCs） in Luohe City During Summer].

Luohe City is an important node city in the Central Plains Urban Agglomeration in China, where the atmospheric ozone （O） pollution situation has been serious in recent years. In order to provide a scientific basis for O pollution control, the online filed observation of O precursor volatile organic compounds （VOCs） was carried out in Luohe City in July 2022 to understand their variation characteristics and sources. The mean ratio of （TVOCs） during the observation period was （16.

Volatile organic compounds at a highland forest site in the southeast of the Tibetan Plateau: Source apportionment and reactivity contributions.

Atmospheric volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are reactive species and the primary precursors of free radicals; thus, VOCs play important roles in tropospheric chemistry. Tibet field campaigns from April 4 to May 11, 2021 found high mixing ratios and reactivity contributions of oxygenated VOCs (OVOCs) at Lulang, a site with high vegetation cover and strong solar ultraviolet radiation on the southeast of the Tibetan Plateau (TP). The 13 OVOCs detected accounted for 49% of the total VOCs (TVOCs, with a mean mixing ratio ±1σ of 11.

miMatch: a microbial metabolic background matching tool for mitigating host confounding in metagenomics research.

Metagenomic research faces a persistent challenge due to the low concordance across studies. While matching host confounders can mitigate the impact of individual differences, the influence of factors such as genetics, environment, and lifestyle habits on microbial profiles makes it exceptionally challenging to create fully matched cohorts. The microbial metabolic background, which modulates microbial composition, reflects a cumulative impact of host confounders, serving as an ideal baseline for microbial sample matching.

Factors affected the ovarian reserve after laparoscopic cystectomy for ovarian endometriomas.

Objective: To identify related factors that affect the ovarian reserve after laparoscopic ovarian cystectomy in patients with endometriomas.

Study Design: It was a retrospective cohort study performed in a tertiary-care university hospital. A total of 409 patients with endometriomas underwent laparoscopic ovarian cystectomy between June 2014 and November 2021.

The Growing Little Brain: Cerebellar Functional Development from Cradle to School.

Despite the cerebellum's crucial role in brain functions, its early development, particularly in relation to the cerebrum, remains poorly understood. Here, we examine cerebellocortical connectivity using over 1,000 high-quality resting-state functional MRI scans of children from birth to 60 months. By mapping cerebellar topography with fine temporal detail for the first time, we show the hierarchical organization of cerebellocortical functional connectivity from infancy.

Poly (β-amino esters)/Mobil Composition of Matter 41-mediated delivery of siIL-1β alleviates deep vein thrombosis in rat hind limbs.

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) is a major cause of cardiovascular disease-related deaths worldwide and is considered a thrombotic inflammatory disorder. IL-1β, as a key promoter of venous thrombus inflammation, is a potential target for DVT treatment. Constructing a nanocarrier system for intracellular delivery of siIL-1β to silence IL-1β may be an effective strategy for alleviating DVT.