柏林洪堡大学Carsten Finke小组取得一项新突破。他们的最新研究探明了大脑形状形成的分形分析预测了人类新生儿的年龄和遗传相似性。这一研究成果发表在2025年12月29日出版的国际学术期刊《自然—神经科学》上。

在这里，课题组表明人类新生儿经历了大脑形状的快速形成，超出了大脑大小的预期增长。利用结构神经成像数据的分形维数（FD）分析，该课题组人员发现大脑形状强烈地反映了婴儿的成熟度，而不是脑大小的差异，在预测婴儿扫描年龄方面明显优于脑大小(平均误差约为4Days)能够检测出未被大脑大小捕获的早产特征，系统地对婴儿的遗传变异更加敏感，并且在预测哪些新生儿是双胞胎兄弟姐妹方面具有优势，准确率高达97%。此外，FD捕获的年龄和遗传信息明显优于早期的形态学测量，包括皮质厚度、曲率、旋转、沟化、表面积和T1加权/T2加权比。这些发现确定了大脑形状的形成是人类大脑发育的基本成熟过程，并表明，从生物学角度来看，FD应该被解释为早期大脑成熟的发育标志，其根源在于几何形状而不是大小。

据介绍，新生儿期是人类大脑发育的关键阶段。在这段时间里，大脑的大小急剧增加，但它的形态在生命早期是如何出现的，这在很大程度上仍然未知。

附：英文原文

Title: Fractal analysis of brain shape formation predicts age and genetic similarity in human newborns

Author: Krohn, Stephan, Romanello, Amy, von Schwanenflug, Nina, Rasmussen, Jerod M., Buss, Claudia, Valk, Sofie L., Madan, Christopher R., Finke, Carsten

Issue&Volume: 2025-12-29

Abstract: The neonatal period represents a critical phase of human brain development. During this time, the brain shows a dramatic increase in size, but how its morphology emerges in early life remains largely unknown. Here we show that human newborns undergo a rapid formation of brain shape, beyond the expected growth in brain size. Using fractal dimensionality (FD) analysis of structural neuroimaging data, we show that brain shape strongly reflects infant maturity beyond differences in brain size, significantly outperforms brain size in predicting infant age at scan (mean error approximately 4days), detects signatures of premature birth that are not captured by brain size, is systematically more sensitive to genetic variability among infants and is superior in predicting which newborns are twin siblings, with up to 97% accuracy. Additionally, FD captures age and genetic information significantly better than earlier morphological measures, including cortical thickness, curvature, gyrification, sulcation, surface area and the T1-weighted/T2-weighted ratio. These findings identify the formation of brain shape as a fundamental maturational process in human brain development and show that, biologically, FD should be interpreted as a developmental marker of early-life brain maturity, which is rooted in geometry rather than size.

DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02107-w

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02107-w