…How to approach visual neurorehabilitation?
To date, we have little understanding of how the visual cortex reorganizes after injury, and no proven effective treatment strategies to rehabilitate the recovery of visual perception in the affected portion of the visual field in V1-lesioned patients.
Understanding how to manipulate the brain’s capacity for plasticity is an important step in the long-term effort to design treatments aiming to enhance the ability of the nervous system to recover after injury. To make progress along this front, we need to:i) study the mechanisms by which the adult brain adapts and reorganizes after injury; and ii) devise approaches that will allow us to manipulate the process of reorganization to induce visual recovery.
The network of visual areas can be viewed as a heavily interconnected circuit subject to a series of hierarchy rules. Early areas usually process sensory information initially, by passing it on to higher areas, and in turn, extract “higher” order features and control the flow of information through feedback loops. Increased performance following training can therefore be the result of changes that occur in early areas (Schoups et al., 2001; Yotsumoto et al., 2008; Censor and Sagi, 2009; Karni and Sagi, 2008), or the result of changes that occur in “higher” visual areas and attentional networks (Law and Gold, 2008; Yang and Maunsell, 2004; Lewis et al., 2009).
Area V1 injuries, interrupt the cardinal feed-forward pathway but, as discussed above, visually driven information can still activate surviving extrastriate areas through bypassing routes (Cowey, 1974; Dineen et al., 1982; Rodman et al., 1989; Cowey and Stoerig, 1997; Baseler et al.,…
TBI Rehabilitation 