A Study Of Brain Functional Plasticity Of Small-Ball Players Based On Time Series Relevance

Since the development of brain science,many studies has focused on the brain plasticity.By studying brain plasticity,we can understand how the brain changes under the influence of external environment and internal experience.Therefore we can arrange motor training,motor learning and exercise rehabilitation more reasonably and efficiently.Little-ball sports?table tennis and badminton?require athletes to integrate their sensorimotor information quickly and adapt to the sports,so little-ball players who have experienced training and competition are very suitable for studying brain plasticity.Functional magnetic resonance imaging as a non-invasive,non-radiation brain imaging technology has been welcomed by academia and clinicians.Based on the time series data of functional magnetic resonance images,we use regional homogeneity?ReHo?method,step-wise functional connectivity?SFC?method and optimal connectivity distance method to study the brain functional plasticity of little-ball players.The main work is as follows:1.Based on the time series data of functional magnetic resonance images,we calculated the ReHo values of the little-ball player group and the healthy control group,respectively.Two-sample t-test was used to compare the between-group differences.We found that the ReHo values in left anterior cingulate cortex,insula,thalamus and vermis 1₂ were significantly greater than that in the healthy control group.These regions constitute an autonomic nervous response loop that is very important for cardiovascular integration.The results suggested that the initial change of the little-ball players undergoing the motor training is the cardiovascular autonomic response loop.2.Based on the structural magnetic resonance image data,we first calculated the Voxel-Based Morphometry?VBM?index of the little-ball player group and the healthy control group respectively.The between-group differences were compared by two-sample t test.The athlete group showed significantly increased gray matter volume in two main clusters compared with the healthy control group.One cluster was mainly located in the right sensorimotor region,which was responsible for complex cognitive functions such as visual perception,spatial perception,visuomotor integration,and motor control.The other cluster was mainly located in the limbic lobe and the anterior lobe of the cerebellum,which played an important role in motor execution,synchronization,coordination,control,prediction and visual attention.Then,we used the brain regions showing between-group VBM differences as seeds to calculate the step-wise functional connectivity and optimal connectivity distance between seeds and the whole brain.The permutation test was applied to detect the statistical difference between the two groups because of the non-normality behavior of the optimal connectivity distance distribution.The results demonstrated that the athletes displayed significantly smaller optimal connectivity distance from those seed regions to the dorsal attention network?DAN?and larger optimal connectivity distance to the default mode network?DMN?compared to controls.Furthermore,there action time of the orienting attention subnetwork was positively correlated with optimal connectivity distance between the seeds and the DAN while negatively correlated with optimal connectivity distance between the seeds and the DMN.Our findings suggest that neuroplastic adaptations on functional connectivity streams after motor skill training may enable athletes to regulate the focus of external and internal attention synchronously in athletes,and consequently acceleratethe reaction time of orienting attention in athletes.