From circuits to lifespan: Translating mouse and human timelines with neuroimaging based tractography

This repository contains data and scripts to translate ages across some species as well as neuroimaging scans. The dataset also contains diffusion MR tractography of post-mortem mouse brains, which includes tractography and diffusion metrics. This work builds on our Translating Time resource, which is a tool that equates corresponding ages during development. We collected 1,125 observations from age-related changes in body, bone, dental, and brain processes to equate corresponding ages across humans, mice, and rats. We also acquired high-resolution diffusion MR scans of mouse brains (n=16) of either sex at sdifferent postnatal ages (postnatal day 3, 4, 12, 21, 60) to track brain circuit maturation (e.g., olfactory association, transcallosal pathways).

Methods

We used multiple programs to extract data out of the attached data. We used DSI Studio software (https://dsi-studio.labsolver.org/) to quantify several diffusivity metrics (e.g., fractional anisotropy).  We also studied diffusion MR tractography. These tractography files can be opened with Trackvis, which is a free software program to open and analyze diffusion MR data. Go to the file tab, and click on "open track" to open track files.  Click on load image to load the niftii files.  

We also collected time points to generate age alignments across humans and rodents. The scripts and data for these age alignments can be opened with the programming language R. Please see the readme file for more details and Cottam et al., 2025 for more details. 

Reference:

Cottam NC, Ofori K, Stoll KT, Bryant M, Rogge JR, Hekmatyar K, Sun J, Charvet CJ. 2025. From circuits to lifespan: translating mouse and human timelines with neuroimaging based tractography. J Neurosci. In Press.  doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1429-24.2025. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39870528.