RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Intrasession and Intersession Reproducibility of Artificial Scotoma pRF Mapping Results at Ultra-High Fields JF eneuro JO eNeuro FD Society for Neuroscience SP ENEURO.0087-22.2022 DO 10.1523/ENEURO.0087-22.2022 VO 9 IS 5 A1 Linhardt, David A1 Pawloff, Maximilian A1 Woletz, Michael A1 Hummer, Allan A1 Tik, Martin A1 Vasileiadi, Maria A1 Ritter, Markus A1 Lerma-Usabiaga, Garikoitz A1 Schmidt-Erfurth, Ursula A1 Windischberger, Christian YR 2022 UL http://www.eneuro.org/content/9/5/ENEURO.0087-22.2022.abstract AB Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with population receptive field (pRF) mapping allows for associating positions on the visual cortex to areas on the visual field. Apart from applications in healthy subjects, this method can also be used to examine dysfunctions in patients suffering from partial visual field losses. While such objective measurement of visual deficits (scotoma) is of great importance for, e.g., longitudinal studies addressing treatment effects, it requires a thorough assessment of accuracy and reproducibility of the results obtained. In this study, we quantified the reproducibility of pRF mapping results within and across sessions in case of central visual field loss in a group of 15 human subjects. We simulated scotoma by masking a central area of 2° radius from stimulation to establish ground-truth conditions. This study was performed on a 7T ultra-high field MRI scanner for increased sensitivity. We found excellent intrasession and intersession reproducibility for the pRF center position (Spearman correlation coefficients for x, y: >0.95; eccentricity: >0.87; polar angle: >0.98), but only modest reproducibility for pRF size (Spearman correlation coefficients around 0.4). We further examined the scotoma detection performance using an automated method based on a reference dataset acquired with full-field stimulation. For the 2° artificial scotoma, the group-averaged scotoma sizes were estimated at between 1.92° and 2.19° for different sessions. We conclude that pRF mapping of visual field losses yields robust, reproducible measures of retinal function and suggest the use of pRF mapping as an objective method for monitoring visual deficits during therapeutic interventions or disease progression.