Hundreds of scientists around the world combined data to create the world's first brain growth chart.To the project
We know that the human brain changes induring life, but doctors do not have information about how the brain should develop at different ages. What a normal healthy brain looks like at 15 compared to 45. Richard Bethlehem of the University of Cambridge and Jacob Seidlitz of the University of Pennsylvania worked with hundreds of researchers from around the world to solve this problem.
To create graphs showing developmentbrain over a lifetime, you need to collect a huge set of data. Because MRI of the brain is expensive and time-consuming, one team would not be able to get the data they need. So the researchers decided to collaborate with hundreds of scientists around the world, each doing their own brain scan research.
As a result, the project collected 123,984 MRI images from overthan 100,000 people. The scans covered subjects from a fetus at 15 weeks to people who are 100 years old. This amount of data helped the researchers calculate percentile scores that define normal brain size spectra for different age ranges.
A new study has shown, for example, that the volumeGray matter in the human brain peaks at age six, but white matter continues to grow until around age 29. Around the age of 50, white matter volume in the brain begins to decrease rapidly.
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