White matter microstructure and macrostructure brain charts across the human lifespan.

ABSTRACT: Normative reference charts are widely used in healthcare, especially for assessing the development of individuals by benchmarking anatomic and physiological features against population trajectories across the lifespan. Recent work has extended this concept to gray matter morphology in the brain, but no such reference framework currently exists for white matter (WM) even though WM constitutes the essential substrate for neuronal communication and large-scale network integration. Here, we present the first comprehensive WM brain charts, which describe how microstructural and macrostructural features of WM evolve across the lifespan, by leveraging over 26,199 diffusion MRI scans from 42 harmonized studies. Using generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape (GAMLSS), we estimate

SUBMITTER: Kim ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12247954 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature