Brain Fiber Architecture in the Blind

Introduction: Blind people compensate for the loss of vision with enhanced abilities in other sensory and cognitive areas. These behavioral adaptations are often, at least in part, the result of cross-modal recruitment of visual cortices. Consequently, differences in white matter fiber architecture between blind and sighted individuals are of interest as they may reflect the brain’s capacity to adapt in response to chronic visual deprivation. Here we mapped the profile of differences in white matter fiber architecture between blind and sighted subjects using a new method that combines tensor-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Using a multivariate analysis of the full 6-dimensional tensor, group differences in fiber structure were more powerfully detected than with DTI-derived scalar statistics.