Brain plasticity: feasibility of a cortical visual prosthesis for the blind

Author

Ferrández, J.M. ; Alfaro, A. ; Bonomini, P. ; Tormos, J.M. ; Concepción, L. ; Pelayo, F. ; Fernández, E.

Author_Institution

Dept. Electron. y Tecnologia de Computadores, Univ. Politecnica de Cartagena, Spain

Volume

3

fYear

2003

fDate

17-21 Sept. 2003

Firstpage

2027

Abstract

In this paper, fMRI is used to study the brain activation in the task of reading Braille characters by two different groups: sighted subjects and congenitally blind people. It has been observed noticeable diversity in the activation maps between both populations. Finally, fMRI is proposed as a non-invasive method to study the degree of remaining functional visual cortex in blind subjects and establish a reliable methodology for the selection of suitable subjects for a cortical visual prosthesis.

Keywords

biomedical MRI; brain; eye; handicapped aids; neurophysiology; prosthetics; vision; Braille characters; blind; brain activation; brain plasticity; cortical visual prosthesis; fMRI; functional visual cortex; Brain; Electroencephalography; Hospitals; Humans; Magnetic resonance imaging; Neural prosthesis; Neuroplasticity; Performance analysis; Spatial resolution; Visual prosthesis;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2003. Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference of the IEEE

ISSN

1094-687X

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7789-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IEMBS.2003.1280133

Filename

1280133