Thanks to a complex database combining 123,984 magnetic resonance images, we now have a complete picture of how the brain grows and shrinks over our lives.
The scans cover every stage of life, from a 16-week-old fetus to a 100 year old adult, and they could prove to be an important resource to researchers studying brain development and brain diseases in the future.
The new brain charts, which you can look up for yourself online, were pulled together from over 100 previous studies and put into a standard format that could be compared over time.
There are no standardized growth charts for brain development like there are for other growth metrics such as height and weight, despite the fact that the brain goes through many changes over the human lifespan.
Our work brings together a huge amount of data that will continue to grow, allowing researchers and eventually clinicians to evaluate brain development against standardized measures.
As well as showing rapid expansion in early life and a slow decline as we get older, the brain charts reveal milestone that haven't been noticed before.
After six years of age, gray matter starts to slow down. The growth of white matter peaks at age 29 and starts to decrease in volume in our 30s.
The gray matter volume in the subcortex peaks in adolescence at 14-and-a-half years old. These are useful for future analysis.
One of the ways the charts can be used is to diagnose and monitor brain disorders such as Alzheimer's, where the brain is undergoing abnormal changes, providing a comparative reference point for healthy brain size and condition at different points in life.
Richard Bethlehem is a neuroscientist from the University of Cambridge in the UK.
As the tool is standardized, you should still be able to compare it.
The database already has a lot of useful information for researchers, and it has been designed so that new data can be easily added, which is why the researchers emphasize that more data and more refinements will be required before the database can be used in a clinical setting.
It's not possible to get this dataset together in a standardized form over a weekend. 2 million hours of computing time were used to build the brain charts.
The next stage is to expand the database further, specifically with brainMRI data for socio-economic and ethnic groups that are typically under-represented in studies. The usefulness of the charts can only increase from here.
Bethlehem says that it is possible to create these tools by bringing together huge datasets with their Brain Charts.
The charts are already beginning to provide interesting insights into brain development, and our ambition is that in future, as we integrate more datasets and refine the charts, they could eventually become part of routine clinical practice.
The research has been published.
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