BRain development, Imaging trajectories and Deviations in brain morpholoGy in the pEdiatric population; BRIDGing thE gap (BRIDGE gap study

Project summary

Reference growth curves are an established concept in many fields of child development, used as standard of care in everyday clinical practice to detect deviations in typical patterns of growth. This is extremely beneficial for in-depth understanding of disease, treatment, and follow-up in children. However, there currently are no suitable growth charts that can be applied to assess trajectories of neurodevelopment.

The Generation R Study has one of the largest population-based samples of children with neuroimaging data. This brings us in a unique position to test the utility of direct comparison of clinical scans with population-based derived normative data.

The primary goal of this project is to develop clinically relevant growth charts for global and regional brain regions in children. In addition, we analyze the robustness of these curves by comparing them to international reference populations derived from other population-based studies. To test the applicability of these growth charts in a clinical setting, we will use thecharts to depict deviations in neurodevelopment in different patient groups. The second goal is to evaluate variations in brain development to help decide in everyday practice whether a finding is a relevant abnormality in brain development or not.

The knowledge obtained on variations in brain development would evaluate the consequences of incidental findings to bridge the gap between widely accepted consensus and factual evidence-based medicine.