Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study Of Brain Structure And Function In Children With Monocular Amblyopia

Current studies believe that amblyopia is not a simple ocular abnormal disease,and its clinical manifestations are closely related to the abnormalities of the visual nervous system of the brain,but the neuropathological basis of amblyopia has not been clarified.Therefore,this study recruited two monocular amblyopia subtypes(strabismus amblyopia and anisometropia amblyopia)children patients and age matched healthy control(HC)children(aged 4 to 12,a total of 30 participants screening from 55 participants,17 of them were male)and then,collected high-resolution structural magnetic resonance image(s MRI),resting state functional MRI(rs-f MRI),and naturalistic stimulation functional MRI(ns-f MRI)data of all subjects to explore the neuropathological and physiological basis of children with monocular amblyopia.In this study,the first part combined s MRI and rs-f MRI data and focused on the changes in brain structure and function of children with monocular amblyopia compared with healthy controls.The results showed that compared with the control group,the gray matter volume of strabismic amblyopia and anisometropic amblyopia had different degrees of changes in the posterior cerebellar,central anterior gyrus.The intensity and homogeneity of spontaneous brain activity have abnormal changes in the frontal lobe,cerebellum posterior lobe,parietal lobe and occipital lobe.And these structural and functional changes have different manifestations between the two groups of patients.The second part used independent component analysis and functional network connectivity methods to explore the brain function network connection mode of amblyopic children under natural visual stimulation.The results showed that the internal connectivity of the amblyopic children’s salience network,auditory network and sensorimotor network was abnormal,the connectivity between the primary visual network and the central executive network was abnormal,and different brain network connection patterns were found between the two groups of patients.Finally,make a correlation analysis between the indicators of significantly different brain regions and visual acuity.It was found that the gray matter volume of the left precentral gyrus in children with anisometropic amblyopia were negatively correlated with visual acuity.No significant correlation was found in other indicators and regions.These results showed that there were significant differences in the structure and function of local nerve tissue between 4-12-year-old children with amblyopia and normal vision,and the changes of neural activity in some brain regions showed differences in different types of amblyopia,indicated that the neuropathological basis of the two diseases may be different.Furthermore,the results of functional network connection showed that amblyopic children may affect their functional development related to movement,hearing,execution,cognition and so on because of visual developmental defects.In addition,the correlation of various neural activity indicators with clinical indicators indicated that the influence of abnormal visual input on neural development may be different in patients with different types of amblyopia.