Lao Yi, Kang Yue, Collignon Olivier, Brun Caroline, Kheibai Shadi B, Alary Flamine, Gee James, Nelson Marvin D, Lepore Franco, Lepore Natasha
aDepartment of Radiology, Children's Hospital Los Angeles and University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California bPenn Image Computing and Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA cDepartment of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Neuroreport. 2015 Dec 16;26(18):1151-4. doi: 10.1097/WNR.0000000000000488.
Early blind individuals are known to exhibit structural brain reorganization. Particularly, early-onset blindness may trigger profound brain alterations that affect not only the visual system but also the remaining sensory systems. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) allows in-vivo visualization of brain white matter connectivity, and has been extensively used to study brain white matter structure. Among statistical approaches based on DTI, tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) is widely used because of its ability to automatically perform whole brain white matter studies. Tract specific analysis (TSA) is a more recent method that localizes changes in specific white matter bundles. In the present study, we compare TBSS and TSA results of DTI scans from 12 early blind individuals and 13 age-matched sighted controls, with two aims: (a) to investigate white matter alterations associated with early visual deprivation; (b) to examine the relative sensitivity of TSA when compared with TBSS, for both deficit and hypertrophy of white matter microstructures. Both methods give consistent results for broad white matter regions of deficits. However, TBSS does not detect hypertrophy of white matter, whereas TSA shows a higher sensitivity in detecting subtle differences in white matter colocalized to the posterior parietal lobe.
已知早期失明个体表现出大脑结构重组。特别是，早发性失明可能引发深刻的大脑改变，不仅影响视觉系统，还会影响其他感觉系统。扩散张量成像（DTI）能够在活体中可视化大脑白质连接，并已广泛用于研究大脑白质结构。在基于DTI的统计方法中，基于束的空间统计学（TBSS）因其能够自动进行全脑白质研究而被广泛使用。束特异性分析（TSA）是一种更新的方法，可定位特定白质束的变化。在本研究中，我们比较了12名早期失明个体和13名年龄匹配的视力正常对照者的DTI扫描的TBSS和TSA结果，有两个目的：（a）研究与早期视觉剥夺相关的白质改变；（b）与TBSS相比，检验TSA对白质微观结构缺陷和肥大的相对敏感性。两种方法在广泛的白质缺陷区域给出了一致的结果。然而，TBSS未检测到白质肥大，而TSA在检测与顶叶后部共定位的白质细微差异方面表现出更高的敏感性。
