Your brain expands and shrinks over time — these charts show how

不逐句复制了，用了下Yicat然后整篇导出的译文。

Based on more than 120,000 brain scans, the charts are still preliminary. But researchers hope they could one day be used as a routine clinical tool by physicians.

When neuroscientist Jakob Seidlitz took his 15-month-old son to the paediatrician for a check-up last week, he left feeling unsatisfied. There wasn’t anything wrong with his son — the youngster seemed to be developing at a typical pace, according to the height and weight charts the physician used. What Seidlitz felt was missing was an equivalent metric to gauge how his son’s brain was growing. “It is shocking how little biological information doctors have about this critical organ,” says Seidlitz, who is based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Soon, he might be able to change that. Working with colleagues, Seidlitz has amassed more than 120,000 brain scans — the largest collection of its kind — to create the first comprehensive growth charts for brain development. The charts show visually how human brains expand quickly early in life and then shrink slowly with age. The sheer magnitude of the study, published in Nature on 6 April1, has stunned neuroscientists, who have long had to contend with reproducibility issues in their research, in part because of small sample sizes. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is expensive, meaning that scientists are often limited in the number of participants they can enrol in experiments.

“The massive data set they assembled is extremely impressive and really sets a new standard for the field,” says Angela Laird, a cognitive neuroscientist at Florida International University in Miami.

Even so, the authors caution that their database isn’t completely inclusive — they struggled to gather brain scans from all regions of the globe. The resulting charts, they say, are therefore just a first draft, and further tweaks would be needed to deploy them in clinical settings.

If the charts are eventually rolled out to paediatricians, great care will be needed to ensure that they are not misinterpreted, says Hannah Tully, a paediatric neurologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “A big brain is not necessarily a well-functioning brain,” she says.

---

这些图表可以显示----你的大脑随着时间推移不断扩大最后萎缩

基于超过120，000个脑部扫描，这些图表仍然处于初步阶段。但是研究人员希望有一天它们可以作为医生的常规临床工具。

当精神学家Jakob Seidlitz带他15个月大的儿子上周去儿科医生那里检查后，他走的时候并不感到满意。他儿子一点问题也没有——根据医生使用的身高体重表，这个小家伙看