PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Luke Baxter
AU  - Fiona Moultrie
AU  - Sean Fitzgibbon
AU  - Marianne Aspbury
AU  - Roshni Mansfield
AU  - Matteo Bastiani
AU  - Richard Rogers
AU  - Saad Jbabdi
AU  - Eugene Duff
AU  - Rebeccah Slater
TI  - Functional and diffusion MRI reveal the functional and structural basis of infants’ noxious-evoked brain activity
AID  - 10.1101/2020.04.28.065730
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.04.28.065730
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/30/2020.04.28.065730.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/30/2020.04.28.065730.full
AB  - Understanding the neurophysiology underlying pain perception in infants is central to improving early life pain management. In this multimodal MRI study, we use resting-state functional and white matter diffusion MRI to investigate individual variability in infants’ noxious-evoked brain activity. In an 18-infant nociception-paradigm dataset, we show it is possible to predict infants’ cerebral haemodynamic responses to experimental noxious stimulation using their resting-state activity across nine networks from a separate stimulus-free scan. In an independent 215-infant Developing Human Connectome Project dataset, we use this resting-state-based prediction model to generate noxious responses. We identify a significant correlation between these predicted noxious responses and infants’ white matter mean diffusivity, and this relationship is subsequently confirmed within our nociception-paradigm dataset. These findings reveal that a newborn infant’s pain-related brain activity is tightly coupled to both their spontaneous resting-state activity and underlying white matter microstructure. This work provides proof-of-concept that knowledge of an infant’s functional and structural brain architecture could be used to predict pain responses, informing infant pain management strategies and facilitating evidence-based personalisation of care.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.