Local neonatologist creates software that predicts motor development disorders in preterm babies
Nehal Parikh and his team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital discovered a way to predict motor development risks in a more objective way than existing diagnostic tools.
Very preterm babies (born before 30 weeks of gestation) have about a 50% risk of developing minor motor abnormalities, and up to 10% develop cerebral palsy (CP). But identifying biomarkers of CP at an early stage of life could significantly increase the quality of life for both affected patients and their families.
At Cincinnati Children’s, neonatologist Nehal Parikh and his team developed a software tool for MRIs that predicts motor development disorders in preterm babies. They enrolled very prematurely born infants in their study and performed brain structural MRI scans at the term-equivalent age. These images were fed into an algorithm created using a probabilistic brain atlas constructed specifically for a very preterm infant brain.
With this work, doctors should be able to detect diffuse white matter abnormality (DWMA) — the cause of many neurological disorders — with 95% accuracy.
