Response to short-term deprivation of the human adult visual cortex measured with 7T BOLD
- University of Pisa, Italy
- IRCCS Stella Maris, Italy
Abstract
Sensory deprivation during the post-natal 'critical period' leads to structural reorganization of the developing visual cortex. In adulthood, the visual cortex retains some flexibility and adapts to sensory deprivation. Here we show that short-term (2h) monocular deprivation in adult humans boosts the BOLD response to the deprived eye, changing ocular dominance of V1 vertices, consistent with homeostatic plasticity. The boost is strongest in V1, present in V2, V3 and V4 but absent in V3a and hMT+. Assessment of spatial frequency tuning in V1 by a population Receptive-Field technique shows that deprivation primarily boosts high spatial frequencies, consistent with a primary involvement of the parvocellular pathway. Crucially, the V1 deprivation effect correlates across participants with the perceptual increase of the deprived eye dominance assessed with binocular rivalry, suggesting a common origin. Our results demonstrate that visual cortex, particularly the ventral pathway, retains a high potential for homeostatic plasticity in the human adult.
Data availability
BOLD responses and pRF fits as shown in all figures (main and supplementary) have been deposited on Dryad, through a link provided with the current submission (doi:10.5061/dryad.tp24j18). Custom Matlab code, used for pRF fitting, is included as Source code file 1.
-
Short-term plasticity of the human adult visual cortex measured with 7T BOLDDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.tp24j18.
Article and author information
Author details
Maria Concetta Morrone
Funding
European Research Council (ERC ECSPLAIN 338866)
- Paola Binda
- Jan W Kurzawski
- Maria Concetta Morrone
Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca (PRIN2015)
- Claudia Lunghi
- Maria Concetta Morrone
European Research Council (ERA-NET Neuro-DREAM)
- Claudia Lunghi
- Maria Concetta Morrone
European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (NextGenVis 641805)
- Jan W Kurzawski
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Experimental procedures are in line with the declaration of Helsinki and were approved by the regional ethics committee [Comitato Etico Pediatrico Regionale-Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Meyer-Firenze (FI)] and by the Italian Ministry of Health, under the protocol 'Plasticità e multimodalità delle prime aree visive: studio in risonanza magnetica a campo ultra alto (7T)'.
Copyright
© 2018, Binda et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,505
- views
-
- 380
- downloads
-
- 66
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Response to short-term deprivation of the human adult visual cortex measured with 7T BOLD
eLife 7:e40014.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.40014
Further reading
-
- Medicine
- Neuroscience
Background:
Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a global health problem with limited therapeutic options. The biochemical mechanisms that lead to this disorder are not yet fully understood, and in this respect, metabolomics represents a promising approach to decipher metabolic events related to AUD. The plasma metabolome contains a plethora of bioactive molecules that reflects the functional changes in host metabolism but also the impact of the gut microbiome and nutritional habits.
Methods:
In this study, we investigated the impact of severe AUD (sAUD), and of a 3-week period of alcohol abstinence, on the blood metabolome (non-targeted LC-MS metabolomics analysis) in 96 sAUD patients hospitalized for alcohol withdrawal.
Results:
We found that the plasma levels of different lipids ((lyso)phosphatidylcholines, long-chain fatty acids), short-chain fatty acids (i.e. 3-hydroxyvaleric acid) and bile acids were altered in sAUD patients. In addition, several microbial metabolites, including indole-3-propionic acid, p-cresol sulfate, hippuric acid, pyrocatechol sulfate, and metabolites belonging to xanthine class (paraxanthine, theobromine and theophylline) were sensitive to alcohol exposure and alcohol withdrawal. 3-Hydroxyvaleric acid, caffeine metabolites (theobromine, paraxanthine, and theophylline) and microbial metabolites (hippuric acid and pyrocatechol sulfate) were correlated with anxiety, depression and alcohol craving. Metabolomics analysis in postmortem samples of frontal cortex and cerebrospinal fluid of those consuming a high level of alcohol revealed that those metabolites can be found also in brain tissue.
Conclusions:
Our data allow the identification of neuroactive metabolites, from interactions between food components and microbiota, which may represent new targets arising in the management of neuropsychiatric diseases such as sAUD.
Funding:
Gut2Behave project was initiated from ERA-NET NEURON network (Joint Transnational Call 2019) and was financed by Academy of Finland, French National Research Agency (ANR-19-NEUR-0003-03) and the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS; PINT-MULTI R.8013.19, Belgium). Metabolomics analysis of the TSDS samples was supported by grant from the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies.
-
- Neuroscience
Memory deficits are a hallmark of many different neurological and psychiatric conditions. The Rey–Osterrieth complex figure (ROCF) is the state-of-the-art assessment tool for neuropsychologists across the globe to assess the degree of non-verbal visual memory deterioration. To obtain a score, a trained clinician inspects a patient’s ROCF drawing and quantifies deviations from the original figure. This manual procedure is time-consuming, slow and scores vary depending on the clinician’s experience, motivation, and tiredness. Here, we leverage novel deep learning architectures to automatize the rating of memory deficits. For this, we collected more than 20k hand-drawn ROCF drawings from patients with various neurological and psychiatric disorders as well as healthy participants. Unbiased ground truth ROCF scores were obtained from crowdsourced human intelligence. This dataset was used to train and evaluate a multihead convolutional neural network. The model performs highly unbiased as it yielded predictions very close to the ground truth and the error was similarly distributed around zero. The neural network outperforms both online raters and clinicians. The scoring system can reliably identify and accurately score individual figure elements in previously unseen ROCF drawings, which facilitates explainability of the AI-scoring system. To ensure generalizability and clinical utility, the model performance was successfully replicated in a large independent prospective validation study that was pre-registered prior to data collection. Our AI-powered scoring system provides healthcare institutions worldwide with a digital tool to assess objectively, reliably, and time-efficiently the performance in the ROCF test from hand-drawn images.
