New DTI Marker Characterizing White Matter Maturation in Perisylvian Language Network: Color-Coded Orientation Component Analysis

Jeong-Won Jeong¹, Diane C. Chugani², Tammy Hsia³, Vijay N. Tiwari³, Harry T. Chugani⁴, Senthil K. Sundaram¹

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has the promise that it may aid the prognosis of language deficits in children with developmental delay (DD) and Angelman Syndrome (AS) by visualizing abnormally developed white matter in the perisylvian language network. Although our previous DTI studies [1,2] have suggested global impairment of white matter related to DD and AS by demonstrating quantitative reduction in diffusivity parameter such as fractional anisotropy (FA), determining whether a single DTI scan contains sufficient information to classify and make decision about an individual patient remains a critical challenge due to many experimental confounds, mainly depending on chronological age. The present study introduced new objective marker to quantify developmental maturation of the arcuate fasciculus based on the anterior-posterior (AP) component in colored coded orientation map which quantifies the first eigenvector of the diffusion tensor at every voxel. We first assessed a life-span maturation curve of new marker from healthy controls and examined its feasibility to discriminate the children with DD and AS from typically developing children without age-related confounds.