Brain Plasticity: Feasibility of a Cortical Visual Prosthesis for the Blind.

FERRANDEZ JM, ALFARO A, BONOMINI MP, TORMOS JM, CONCEPCION L, PELAYO F, FERNANDEZ E.

Cancún Mexico

Conferencia; 25th Silver Anniversary International Conference of the IEEE EMBS; 2003

IEEE

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.