Relationship Between Cortical Thickness and Functional Activation in the Early Blind

Anurova, Irina; Renier, Laurent; Volder, Anne De; Carlson, Synnöve; Rauschecker, Josef P.

doi:10.1093/cercor/bhu009

Cited by 86 publications

(124 citation statements)

References 105 publications

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“…Complementary findings are that individual differences in occipital gray matter across blind subjects are correlated with the duration of blindness, and in turn correlated with behavioral performance on non-visual tasks [56, 65], and that cross-modal responses in post-natal blindness are proportional to the loss of the visual field [66]. Our result is in disagreement, however, with a prior study of twelve people with blindness before the age of two [67]. In this prior work, a negative correlation was found between BOLD fMRI response during a sound identification task and cortical thickness in the left collateral sulcus (and at other sites).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 69%

Patterns of Individual Variation in Visual Pathway Structure and Function in the Sighted and Blind

et al. 2016

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Many structural and functional brain alterations accompany blindness, with substantial individual variation in these effects. In normally sighted people, there is correlated individual variation in some visual pathway structures. Here we examined if the changes in brain anatomy produced by blindness alter the patterns of anatomical variation found in the sighted. We derived eight measures of central visual pathway anatomy from a structural image of the brain from 59 sighted and 53 blind people. These measures showed highly significant differences in mean size between the sighted and blind cohorts. When we examined the measurements across individuals within each group we found three clusters of correlated variation, with V1 surface area and pericalcarine volume linked, and independent of the thickness of V1 cortex. These two clusters were in turn relatively independent of the volumes of the optic chiasm and lateral geniculate nucleus. This same pattern of variation in visual pathway anatomy was found in the sighted and the blind. Anatomical changes within these clusters were graded by the timing of onset of blindness, with those subjects with a post-natal onset of blindness having alterations in brain anatomy that were intermediate to those seen in the sighted and congenitally blind. Many of the blind and sighted subjects also contributed functional MRI measures of cross-modal responses within visual cortex, and a diffusion tensor imaging measure of fractional anisotropy within the optic radiations and the splenium of the corpus callosum. We again found group differences between the blind and sighted in these measures. The previously identified clusters of anatomical variation were also found to be differentially related to these additional measures: across subjects, V1 cortical thickness was related to cross-modal activation, and the volume of the optic chiasm and lateral geniculate was related to fractional anisotropy in the visual pathway. Our findings show that several of the structural and functional effects of blindness may be reduced to a smaller set of dimensions. It also seems that the changes in the brain that accompany blindness are on a continuum with normal variation found in the sighted.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 69%

Patterns of Individual Variation in Visual Pathway Structure and Function in the Sighted and Blind

et al. 2016

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“…More recently, several groups have started investigating the potential neuroanatomical markers of crossmodal plasticity in the blind as there is ample evidence that experience can shape structural features within the normal brain (see Zatorre et al, 2012). One important neuroplastic change observed in early and congenitally blind individuals relates to increased occipital cortical thickness (CT) relative to sighted controls (Park et al, 2009;Jiang et al, 2009;Bridge et al, 2009;Anurova et al, 2014). Importantly, it has been shown that occipital CT is strongly predictive of auditory abilities in the blind (Voss and Zatorre, 2012), thus confirming that these neuroanatomical changes are behaviourally relevant, and likely result from some form of adaptive compensatory plasticity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early visual deprivation changes cortical anatomical covariance in dorsal-stream structures

Voss

Zatorre

2015

NeuroImage

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“…To take a somewhat extreme example, if half the experimental population have increased cortical thickness as compared to controls and the other half have increased BOLD activation, a spatial map may show overlapping significant areas, even though no individual subject actually has increased cortical thickness and increased BOLD activation. To provide greater insight into the biological mechanisms underlying observed changes, several studies have begun investigating multivariate approaches to multimodal data [11, 13, 14], looking at, for example, the correlation between cortical thickness and BOLD activation in a given region.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eigenanatomy: Sparse dimensionality reduction for multi-modal medical image analysis

Kandel

Wang

Gee

et al. 2015

Methods

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Rigorous statistical analysis of multimodal imaging datasets is challenging. Mass-univariate methods for extracting correlations between image voxels and outcome measurements are not ideal for multimodal datasets, as they do not account for interactions between the different modalities. The extremely high dimensionality of medical images necessitates dimensionality reduction, such as principal component analysis (PCA) or independent component analysis (ICA). These dimensionality reduction techniques, however, consist of contributions from every region in the brain and are therefore difficult to interpret. Recent advances in sparse dimensionality reduction have enabled construction of a set of image regions that explain the variance of the images while still maintaining anatomical interpretability. The projections of the original data on the sparse eigenvectors, however, are highly collinear and therefore difficult to incorporate into mult-modal image analysis pipelines. We propose here a method for clustering sparse eigenvectors and selecting a subset of the eigenvectors to make interpretable predictions from a multi-modal dataset. Evaluation on a publicly available dataset shows that the proposed method outperforms PCA and ICA-based regressions while still maintaining anatomical meaning. To facilitate reproducibility, the complete dataset used and all source code is publicly available.

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Relationship Between Cortical Thickness and Functional Activation in the Early Blind

Cited by 86 publications

References 105 publications

Patterns of Individual Variation in Visual Pathway Structure and Function in the Sighted and Blind

Patterns of Individual Variation in Visual Pathway Structure and Function in the Sighted and Blind

Early visual deprivation changes cortical anatomical covariance in dorsal-stream structures

Eigenanatomy: Sparse dimensionality reduction for multi-modal medical image analysis

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