Deformation-Based Morphometric study on Blind men’s brain structures

Many studies have shown the functional relevance of cross-modal plasticity in blind men. However, few researches have focused on whether such functional plasticity is associated with macroscopic changes of structural anatomy in brain regions. Fortunately, deformation based morphometry (DBM) provides an important tool for the computational anatomy research. In this study we detected the changes of regional volume in brain structures between the blind men and normal controls with DBM method. Information of the difference is derived from the deformation field acquired during HAMMER non-rigid registration. The experimental results show that the regions expanded in the blind men’s brain are located at Brodmann 19,31 while the contracted regions located at Brodmann 17,18. This research is very helpful to discover the relationship between structural anatomy and functional data of blind men at a macroscopic level from neuroimaging perspective.