Audrey Luo

Beyond delighted to see this awesome paper from superstar Audrey Luo now out. See her wonderful thread below re: two highly-replicable axes of white matter development in youth.

3 datasets! 2 axes! 1 beautiful piece of developmental science from @audreycluo.bsky.social

I couldn't find a tool to plot different #neuroimaging data in one consistent style, so I made one! Meet yabplot (yet another brain plot) - a #Python package for (sub)cortex & tracts.🧠
- Simple API
- Built-in atlases
- Custom atlas support
🔗 github.com/teanijarv/ya... (drop a ⭐️!)

With deep gratitude to my PhD adviser who made this work possible @ted-satterthwaite.bsky.social!! 🙌

@ariellekeller.bsky.social @bart-larsen.bsky.social @apmackey.bsky.social Michael P Milham David R Roalf @goliashf.bsky.social Russell T Shinohara Leah H Somerville Sarah M Weinstein @jyeatman.bsky.social @cieslakmatt.bsky.social @arokem.org

So grateful for my coauthors @stevenmeisler.com @valeriejsydnor.bsky.social @aarona-b.bsky.social @joelleba.bsky.social Deanna M Barch @danisbassett.bsky.social Christos Davatzikos Alexandre R Franco Jeff Goldsmith Raquel E Gur Ruben C Gur Fengling Hu @marcjaskir.bsky.social Gregory Kiar

📍For me, the big takeaway is this: the assumptions we make shape the questions we ask. Treat tracts as uniform highways, and they look uniform. Look along them instead, and striking, replicable patterns emerge. We hope this work advances how we study brain development. 12/n

White matter myelination during early infancy is linked to spatial gradients and myelin content at birth - Nature Communications Myelination in early infancy develops at different rates. Here the authors describe this process whereby the back and top of the brain, as well as sections that are least mature at birth develop the f...

Our findings align with evidence that deep WM myelinates early in infancy bit.ly/infwm, potentially reducing electrical crosstalk and stabilizing signal transmission. The protracted, hierarchical maturation of superficial tract regions may help fine-tune neural timing. 11/n

Lastly, we zoomed out: what’s the overall pattern of superficial tract development — where the developmental drama happens? Tract ends near sensorimotor cortex mature earlier; those near association cortex mature later. Our second axis: Sensorimotor ➡️ Association. 10/n

So we tested whether tracts with larger differences in S-A rank between endpoints also show greater differences in maturation age. 🥁 And they do! Development of superficial tract regions follows the cortical hierarchy. 9/n

A tract’s endpoints clearly matter. But how? The IFOF’s frontal and occipital ends sit at opposite poles of the brain’s sensorimotor-association (S-A) axis. We thought: if a tract connects regions far apart on this axis, its two ends might develop differently. 8/n

But for the IFOF, the two ends diverged. The occipital end matured by mid-adolescence, while the frontal end continued developing beyond our studied age window. 🤯 Even within a *single* tract, the two ends can develop very differently. 7/n

For the motor segment of the corpus callosum, the right and left ends of the tract showed very similar developmental patterns, maturing around the same time. ✅ 6/n

But not all tracts are created equal. Some connect similar cortical regions (e.g. motor segment of the corpus callosum). Others link very different parts of the brain (e.g. the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus). We asked: do both ends of a single tract mature the same way? 5/n

We truly didn’t know what we’d find. The pattern we saw was striking – and replicable. Across nearly all tracts, we saw the most developmental drama at superficial tract regions near the cortex. Deep regions showed little age-related change. Our first axis: Deep ➡️ Superficial. 4/n

In three large neuroimaging datasets (total N = 2,716; ages 5-23), we modeled development of mean diffusivity at 100 points along each major white matter tract – using pyAFQ (tractometry.org/pyAFQ) to study along-tract properties. 3/n

Landmark diffusion MRI studies have shown dramatic white matter changes during youth. But most in vivo work summarizes each tract with a single average – even though animal and infant postmortem studies suggest regional variation. So we looked along tracts instead. 2/n

We think of white matter as the highways of the brain. But when we followed development along those highways, we were surprised. The journey is more complex than we thought. My final PhD paper, “Two Axes of White Matter Development”, is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! 🛣️🧠✨
🔗 bit.ly/wm2axes

New research out in @nature.com delineates two replicable axes of human white matter development ft. @audreycluo.bsky.social & @ted-satterthwaite.bsky.social (Psych) @chopresearch.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out this exciting new paper from @joelleba.bsky.social linking white matter to brain organization and cognition!! 🧠 Joëlle has transformed what started as a fun group project at Neurohackademy into a beautiful manuscript 🌈 congrats!!

Depression as a disease of white matter network disruption: Learning from Multiple Sclerosis Depression is a common and debilitating psychiatric disorder that is associated with substantial morbidity and mortality. For nearly 40 years, scientists have attempted to localize depression in the b...

Excited to share that our new review, "Depression as a disease of white matter network disruption: Learning from Multiple Sclerosis," is out now in Biological Psychiatry! We propose MS as a powerful model for studying how white matter network changes contribute to depression.

🧠I am excited to announce that our manuscript introducing a new data resource – PennLEAD (Penn Longitudinal Executive functioning in Adolescent Development) – is now available on bioRxiv. Below are some details highlighting our data resource🧵funded by NIMH R01MH113550
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to share our review "Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment” in @npp-journal.bsky.social! We examine neurobiological, environmental & behavioral evidence for human critical periods in sensory and association cortex +discuss new research directions rdcu.be/eMkVU 🧵

Diffusion MRI Processing in the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study: Innovations and Applications The landmark ongoing HEALthy Brain and Cognitive Development (HBCD) study will longitudinally chart brain development in a large sample (projected n=7,200) of infants through age 10 years with multimo...

After years of development and testing, we are happy to present our work in "Diffusion MRI Processing in the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study: Innovations and Applications"! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... A thread:

Psychedelic 5-HT2A receptor agonism alters neurovascular coupling and differentially affects neuronal and hemodynamic measures of brain function Nature Neuroscience - Padawer-Curry et al. show that the hallucinogenic 5-HT2A receptor agonist DOI alters neurovascular coupling in mice, with implications for the interpretation of human fMRI...

🚨 New science alert! Our cross-species study, now in Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates psychedelics distort how we should interpret functional brain imaging.
👇🧵

nature.com/articles/s41...
#Neuroscience #Psychedelics #BrainImaging

Excited to share that our work introducing the Reproducible Brain Charts (RBC) data resource is now published in Neuron!! 🎉

📚 Read the paper: authors.elsevier.com/c/1lpaF3BtfH...
🧠 Explore the RBC dataset: reprobrainchart.github.io

New preprint from stellar IRTG PhD student Amelie Rauland + team on white matter bundle reconstruction! Shows that WM bundles can be reliably extracted from simple 32-direction dMRI & features predict cognition - huge potential for legacy and clinical data. Thread 👇

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

SYPRES (Synthesis of Psychedelic Research Studies) logo

🍄 Our new living systematic review and meta-analysis on psilocybin for depression is out. Here's what we found and the open science infrastructure we built to support it 🧪🧵
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congrats @audreycluo.bsky.social!! Celebrating a wonderful dissertation defense that shed novel, fundamental, and convincing insights into white matter development.

Thank you reproducibilibuddy / dMRI extraordinaire!!