Thalamo-Sensorimotor Functional Connectivity Correlates with World Ranking of Olympic, Elite, and High Performance Athletes

Figure 1

Whole-brain functional connectivity (FC). (a) High-ranked (HR; , rank: 1–35) and low-ranked (LR; , rank: 39–228) swimmers were divided by a median split in world rankings. (b) The number of functional connections (positive correlations) between an individual voxel and all remaining voxels in the brain was computed by degree of centrality analysis. Whole-brain FC map for HR swimmers is shown by a one-sample -test (against zero). (c) Whole-brain FC map for LR swimmers. (d) HR swimmers show stronger net connections between the right thalamus and the whole brain when compared to those in the LR by a whole-brain two-sample -test. (e) Magnified views of the thalamus show significant group differences in the ventral posterior lateral nucleus, the pulvinar, and the medial dorsal nucleus. All resulting -maps were thresholded at a corrected value of <0.05.