Brain growth charts of “clinical controls”

Clinically acquired brain MRI scans represent a valuable but underused resource for investigating neurodevelopment due to their technical heterogeneity and lack of appropriate controls. To address this challenge, we generated brain growth charts from clinically acquired brain MRI scans with limited imaging pathology from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Electronic Health Record. We found that brain growth charts derived from clinical controls with limited imaging pathology were highly correlated with brain charts from research controls, suggesting the potential of curated clinical MRI scans to supplement costly prospectively acquired research scans.