Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Centre for Biomedical Technology, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Madrid, Spain.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2011 Sep 21;5:90. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00090. eCollection 2011.
Plasticity is the mechanism underlying the brain's potential capability to compensate injury. Recently several studies have shown how functional connections among the brain areas are severely altered by brain injury and plasticity leading to a reorganization of the networks. This new approach studies the impact of brain injury by means of alteration of functional interactions. The concept of functional connectivity refers to the statistical interdependencies between physiological time series simultaneously recorded in various areas of the brain and it could be an essential tool for brain functional studies, being its deviation from healthy reference an indicator for damage. In this article, we review studies investigating functional connectivity changes after brain injury and subsequent recovery, providing an accessible introduction to common mathematical methods to infer functional connectivity, exploring their capabilities, future perspectives, and clinical uses in brain injury studies.
可塑性是大脑潜在补偿损伤能力的机制。最近的几项研究表明，大脑区域之间的功能连接是如何因大脑损伤和可塑性而严重改变的，导致网络的重新组织。这种新方法通过改变功能相互作用来研究脑损伤的影响。功能连接的概念是指同时记录在大脑不同区域的生理时间序列之间的统计相关性，它可能是脑功能研究的重要工具，其偏离健康参考值是损伤的一个指标。在本文中，我们回顾了研究脑损伤后和随后恢复过程中功能连接变化的研究，为常用的推断功能连接的数学方法提供了一个通俗易懂的介绍，探讨了它们的能力、未来前景以及在脑损伤研究中的临床应用。
