Exploring the emergence of morphological asymmetries around the brain’s Sylvian fissure: a longitudinal study of shape variability in preterm infants

Abstract

Brain folding patterns vary within the human species, but some folding properties are common across individuals, including the Sylvian fissure’s inter-hemispheric asymmetry. Contrarily to the other brain folds (sulci), the Sylvian fissure develops through the process of opercularization, with the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes growing over the insular lobe. Its asymmetry may be related to the leftward functional lateralization for language processing, but the time-course of these asymmetries’ development is still poorly understood. In this study, we investigated refined shape features of the Sylvian fissure and their longitudinal development in 71 infants born extremely preterm (mean gestational age at birth: 26.5 weeks) and imaged once before and once at term-equivalent age (TEA). We additionally assessed asymmetrical sulcal patterns at TEA in the perisylvian and inferior frontal regions, neighbor to the Sylvian fissure. While reproducing renown strong asymmetries in the Sylvian fissure, we captured an early encoding of its main asymmetrical shape features, and we observed global asymmetrical shape features representative of a more pronounced opercularization in the left-hemisphere, contrasting with the previously reported right-hemisphere advance in sulcation around birth. This added novel insights about the processes governing early-life brain folding mechanisms, potentially linked to the development of language-related capacities.Highlights-Shape features can be isolated to describe quantitatively the development of the Sylvian fissure-Strong asymmetries are encoded as soon as 30 weeks of post-menstrual age-The process of opercularization is more pronounced in the left hemisphere