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 David Linhardt
A1 Maximilian Pawloff
A1 Michael Woletz
A1 Allan Hummer
A1 Martin Tik
A1 Maria Vasileiadi
A1 Markus Ritter
A1 Garikoitz Lerma-Usabiaga
A1 Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth
A1 Christian Windischberger
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.