Processing of pain by the developing brain: evidence of differences between adolescent and adult females.

"Sponsorships or competing interests that may be relevant to content are disclosed at the end of this article."

"This work was funded by Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center's Trustee Grant Award and NIH/NIAMS Grants R01 AR074795 and P30 AR076316. Marina López-Solà, PhD is hired as part of the Serra Hunter Programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya."

"The neuroimaging data were preprocessed using FSL (FMRIB Software Library version 6.0.3; the Analysis Group, FMRIB, Oxford, United Kingdom), and AFNI (Analysis of Functional Neuroimages version 20.3.02; Medical College of Wisconsin, WI). For the T1-weighted structural image of each participant, brain extraction was performed using FSL's BET (Brain Extraction Tool), then bias correction and segmentation were done using FSL's FAST (FMRIB's Automated Segmentation Tool). The brain extracted image was then normalized and resampled to the 2-mm isotropic Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) ICBM 152 nonlinear sixth-generation template using FSL's FLIRT (FMRIB's Linear Image Registration Tool)., Each participant's functional (BOLD) scans were preprocessed in the following steps: First, brain extraction was performed using FSL's BET. Next, outlying functional volumes (ie, spikes) were detected using the DVARS metric within FSL's “fsl_motion_outliers.” Motion correction of the BOLD time series was done using MCFLIRT. The motion-corrected data were high-pass filtered at 0.01 Hz (100 seconds) and smoothed with a 6-mm full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) filter using AFNI's 3dBandpass. Intensity normalization (ie, scaling each functional volume by its mean global intensity) was applied to minimize confounds arising from pain-induced global cerebral blood flow fluctuations.,,, The intensity-normalized data were then aligned to the MNI template by first coregistering it with the participant's T1 structural MPRAGE image using FSL's FLIRT (6-parameter rigid body model).,"