“We are in a nationwide opioid crisis, so there’s an urgent need for us to better understand how opioid exposure in pregnant women impacts their children,” said senior author of the study Wei Gao, PhD, director of Neuroimaging Research at the Biomedical Imaging Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai and professor of Biomedical Sciences. “Using imaging techniques can help us identify the risks as early as possible so that we can hopefully intervene and minimize the potential adverse impacts on the developing fetal brain.”