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    • The anatomical differences found between the Chinese and U

    2018-11-09

    The anatomical differences found between the Chinese and U.S. child templates parallel the findings of imidazoline receptors differences between these two developmental populations from previous research. For example, Guo et al. (2007) found different trajectory of GM development between Chinese and U.S. children and adolescents. In specific, Chinese children showed a linear decrease of cerebral GM from 7 to 23 years of age, while an inverted U-shape was found with North American children within this age range (e.g., Giedd et al., 1999). A more recent study, Xie et al. (2014), directly compared brain anatomical and developmental trajectories between Chinese and U.S. children and adolescents and found morphological and volumetric differences. Chinese children\'s brains were found to be shorter, wider, and taller compared with brains of their U.S. peers. Moreover, greater cortical GM but less WM volume was shown in Chinese children brain, and differences in GM volume were found in some key brain structures, such as the fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, middle and superior temporal gyri, orbitofrontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, between the two populations. These findings supported the anatomical differences between the Chinese and U.S. child templates shown in the current study. The differences between Chinese and U.S. child templates in brain shape and size were also consistent with previously reported differences between North American and Asian adult templates (Lee et al., 2005; Tang et al., 2010). This suggests that the differences in these brain features are already present in children at least 8 years old. We are uncertain about the cause of these anatomical differences, but suspect that genetic and environmental dissimilarities may both contribute to the dissociations of brain development. Since this was not a goal of the current research, no comprehensive discussion will be included. Using an age- and nationality-appropriate child templates should affect analyses that depend on registration of individual participants to average templates. For example, in VBM (“voxel-based morphometry”), fMRI, and volumetric analyses, the individual participants need to be transformed to a common stereotaxic space (VBM, fMRI) and possibly segmenting priors or atlases based on the average template are used (e.g., VBM). Our analysis used an example of a volumetric analysis of GM and WM changes for Chinese participants across age (e.g., Fig. 9). The GM and WM changes over age were dissimilar to each other when using the templates based on the Chinese participants than templates based on the U.S. templates, for both the FSL (GM, WM) and SPM (GM) computer programs. The GM development for the Chinese children obtained using nationality-appropriate templates were more consistent with those found in Xie et al. (2014). For example, the global GM development for Chinese children showed an inverted U-shape peaking at 12 years of age (Xie et al., 2014) similar to what was found in the current analysis (Fig. 9, left panel). It is likely that these findings were due to registration differences and to different GM/WM tissue volumes in the Chinese and U.S. participants making up the segmenting priors. We believe these differences would be exacerbated in VBM analyses, which depends both on the transformation of voxels from the participants to the normative template and the segmenting priors from the template. Gender is an important factor in the delineation of brain structures for children and adolescents (Giedd et al., 1999; Lenroot et al., 2007). However, two popular sets of MRI templates for North American children and adolescents (Fonov et al., 2011; Sanchez et al., 2012a; also see Richards and Xie, 2015; Richards et al., 2015) did not create templates specific to males and females. Tang et al. (2010) created the Chinese56 adult template for neuroimaging research with Chinese male participants only. We did not create separate templates for Chinese males and females in the current study due to the potential limitation of the number of subjects at some ages. Because gender also has effects on human brain development, future studies should further examine its effect on Chinese children\'s brain development and create separate brain templates for males and females.