Abstract
As a special occupational group, the working and living environments faced by seafarers are greatly different from those of land. It is easy to affect the psychological and physiological activities of seafarers, which inevitably lead to changes in the brain functional activities of seafarers. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the neural activity rules of seafarers’ brain. In view of this, this paper studied the seafarers’ brain alteration at the activated voxel level based on functional magnetic resonance imaging technology by comparing the differences in functional connectivities (FCs) between seafarers and non-seafarers. Firstly, the activated voxels of each group were obtained by independence component analysis, and then the distribution of these voxels in the brain and the common activated voxels between the two groups were statistically analyzed. Next, the FCs between the common activated voxels of the two groups were calculated and obtained the FCs that had significant differences between them through two-sample T-test. Finally, all FCs and FCs with significant differences (DFCs) between the common activated voxels were used as the features for the support vector machine to classify seafarers and non-seafarers. The results showed that DFCs between the activated voxels had better recognition ability for seafarers, especially for Precuneus_L and Precuneus_R, which may play an important role in the classification prediction of seafarers and non-seafarers, so that provided a new perspective for studying the specificity of neurological activities of seafarers.
Highlights
It is a very meaningful research hotspot using functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the relationship between neural activity of the brain and individual behaviors and further consider how they are influenced by the occupation-related training or experiences in the field of cognitive neuroscience
The time series of activated voxels were used to calculate the functional connectivities (FCs) of each subject between the common activated voxels corresponding to the subjects of each group, and the statistical analysis of each FC between these two groups was conducted by the two-sample T-test with false discovery rate (FDR) correction to find out the FCs with significant differences
In view of the current situation that the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based brain FC analysis mainly focuses on the large-scale brain regions, this study investigated the brain FC between the activated voxels of seafarers and non-seafarers
Summary
It is a very meaningful research hotspot using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the relationship between neural activity of the brain and individual behaviors and further consider how they are influenced by the occupation-related training or experiences in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Through resting-state fMRI-based brain functional connectivity (FC) analysis, a detailed and comprehensive description of brain tissue patterns can be achieved, which is helpful to reveal the neural mechanism of cognitive process and the pathogenesis of various neuropsychiatric diseases (Rosenberg et al, 2016; Cui and Gong, 2018; Nielsen et al, 2018) It has been attracted more and more attention from brain researchers in recent years, where FC refers to the temporal correlation between spatially separated brain regions, and any way that measures the correlation between two time series can be used to characterize FC (Dijk et al, 2010; Calhoun and Adali, 2016; De Lacy et al, 2018)
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