Centre for the Developing Brain, Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
Kimberley Whitehead
Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Giovanni Barone
Centre for the Developing Brain, Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Pediatrics, Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Rome, Italy
Ronit Pressler
Clinical Neurosciences, UCL-Institute of Child Health, London, United Kingdom
Francesco Padormo
Centre for the Developing Brain, Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, United States
Centre for the Developing Brain, Division of Imaging Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
Electroencephalographic recordings from the developing human brain are characterized by spontaneous neuronal bursts, the most common of which is the delta brush. Although similar events in animal models are known to occur in areas of immature cortex and drive their development, their origin in humans has not yet been identified. Here, we use simultaneous EEG-fMRI to localise the source of delta brush events in 10 preterm infants aged 32–36 postmenstrual weeks. The most frequent patterns were left and right posterior-temporal delta brushes which were associated in the left hemisphere with ipsilateral BOLD activation in the insula only; and in the right hemisphere in both the insular and temporal cortices. This direct measure of neural and hemodynamic activity shows that the insula, one of the most densely connected hubs in the developing cortex, is a major source of the transient bursting events that are critical for brain maturation.
