Subjective but multidimensional diagnosis plays a central role in infant developmental care, which leads to empirical prediction of future disabilities. Additional support through objective and reproducible markers may reveal neuro-pathological mechanisms and realise earlier and more precise preventive intervention.
In the current study, we retrospectively searched the predictive markers of developmental delay in infants admitted in neonatal intensive care unit that could be developmentally followed up in our outpatient clinic. Based on the hematologic and biochemical data, MRI brain anatomy during admission, we characterized all the thirty-one infants' data distribution with either 'appeared neurologically normal (ANN, n=21)' or 'appeared neurologically abnormal (ANA, n=10)', by a physician's clinical judgement before leaving. After characterizing the data by simple comparisons between ANN and ANA, to identify marker candidates for developmental delay, we attempted to visualize mutual correlating structures in all the factors with multidimensional information processing, principal component analysis (PCA). The results showed moderate positive correlation clustering of head-control, roll-over with certain values of white-blood-cell, aspartate-aminotransferase, lactate-dehydorogenase, creatinine and anatomical distance between frontal-occipital poles, dorsal-ventral-diagonal points. Furthermore, we evaluated the data of these eighteen infants including a crucial newborn clinical marker, umbilical-arterial-pH using a similar multivariate correlation analysis. The result showed similar but partially different as roll-over correlated negatively with umbilical-arterial-pH and brain left laterality, additionally, less correlated with head-control. We concluded that there is the possibility of the translational approach between subjective and objective developmental information by multivariate correlation analysis with candidate markers preliminarily to be evaluated in further studies.