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Neonatal HRFs

Peristimulus timeseries plots showing the evolution of the BOLD haemodynamic response to a brief somatosensory stimulus at different ages. Figure reproduced from Arichi et al. Neuroimage 2012: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811912006702

The haemodynamic response in neonates, and in particular preterm neonates has markedly different morphology and temporal characteristics to the canonical adult function. The lag to positive peak time is significantly delayed and there is a deeper undershoot at term equivalent age. If you are analysing task based BOLD fMRI data, we strongly suggest that you consider using an age appropriate HRF model for convolution into your general linear model.

Please refer to these references if you are using this data or optimising you paradigm with it:

Tomoki Arichi, Gianlorenzo Fagiolo, Marta Varela, Alejandro Melendez-Calderon, Alessandro Allievi, Nazakat Merchant, Nora Tusor, Serena J Counsell, Etienne Burdet, Christian F Beckmann, A David Edwards. Development of BOLD signal hemodynamic responses in the human brain Neuroimage 2012; 63(2): 663-73.
Rhodri Cusack, Conor Wild, Annika C Linke, Tomoki Arichi, David SC Lee, Victor K Han. Optimizing stimulation and analysis protocols for neonatal fMRI. PloS One 2015; 10(8): e0120202.

Neonatal HRF vs Age

Neonatal HRF as a function of age expand

by G.Fagiolo and T.Arichi

Please select an age from the selector below. The resulting Haemodynamic Response Function (HRF) will appear in the output textbox. This can be cut and paste into a text file to be used for subsequent analysis. This web page uses Javascript and HTML5 it works best on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

Data information expand

The HRF below is sampled at 50ms over an interval of 41s for a total of 820 samples.
These are calculated from the data of 54 subjects between 32 and 44 weeks post-menstrual age using somatosensory stimulation of the right hand. Please quote the paper in reference 1.

Select age group between 32 and 38 weeks (press ENTER if necessary):

HRF expand

Right click into the textbox below choose select all and then copy to copy to clipboard.

HRF text appears here

References expand

Please check our website brain-development.org

Arichi, T., Fagiolo, G., Varela, M., Melendez-Calderon, A., Allievi, A., Merchant, N., Tusor, N., Counsell, S.J., Burdet, E., Beckmann, C.F., Edwards, A.D., 2012. Development of BOLD signal hemodynamic responses in the human brain. Neuroimage. available here
RGraph for HTML5 plotting available here

Activation maps

Functional activation maps are available for download from http://brain-development.org/activation-maps/

These include the preterm infant homunculus https://brain-development.org/somatotopicmap/ described in: Dall'Orso et al.
Somatotopic mapping of the developing sensorimotor cortex in the preterm human brain. Cerebral Cortex 2018; 28(7): 2507-15.

Group activation maps of the fMRI clusters https://brain-development.org/activation-maps-related-to-spontaneous-delta-brush-activity/ associated with posterior-temporal spontaneous delta brush events in preterm infants described in Arichi et al. Localization of spontaneous bursting neuronal activity in the preterm human brain with simultaneous EEG-fMRI Elife 2017; 6: e27814.

The developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP)

Our group has also been involved in the ERC funded dHCP in collaboration with colleagues from King's College, Oxford University, and Imperial College London. This has included a state-of-the-art resting state fMRI data processing pipeline led by Sean Fitzgibbon which was decribed in Fitzgibbon et al. Neuroimage 2020.

Resting state networks at term equivalent age from 337 infants in the dHCP have been described in Eyre et al. Brain 2021

The data for the dHCP including high resolution anatomical data, 300 direction multishell diffusion MRI data, high spatial and temporal resolution resting state fMRI data, and clinical & sociodemographic data is available for download.