Atypical white-matter microstructure in congenitally deaf adults: a region of interest and tractography study using diffusion-tensor imaging.

Atypical white-matter microstructure in congenitally deaf adults: a region of interest and tractography study using diffusion-tensor imaging. Hear Res. 2016 Jul 26; Authors: Karns CM, Stevens C, Dow MW, Schorr E, Neville HJ Abstract Considerable research documents the cross-modal reorganization of auditory cortices as a consequence of congenital deafness, with remapped functions that include visual and somatosensory processing of both linguistic and nonlinguistic information. Structural changes accompany this cross-modal neuroplasticity, but precisely which specific structural changes accompany congenital and early deafness and whether there are group differences in hemispheric asymmetries remain to be established. Here, we used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to examine microstructural white matter changes accompanying cross-modal reorganization in 23 deaf adults who were genetically, profoundly, and congenitally deaf, having learned sign language from infancy with 26 hearing controls who participated in our previous fMRI studies of cross-modal neuroplasticity. In contrast to prior literature using a whole-brain approach, we introduce a semiautomatic method for demarcating auditory regions in which regions of interest (ROIs) are defined on the normalized white matter skeleton for all participants, projected into each participants native space, and manually constrained to anatomical boundaries. White-matter ROIs were left and right He...
Source: Hearing Research - Category: Audiology Authors: Tags: Hear Res Source Type: research