Brain plasticity: feasibility of a cortical visual prosthesis for the blind

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.