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

Figure 2

Seed-based functional connectivity (FC). (a) Thalamus-seed FC map for high-ranked (HR) swimmers is shown by a one-sample -test (against zero) with a threshold of top 10% voxels of the whole brain (). (b) Thalamus-seed FC map for low-ranked (LR) swimmers (top 10% voxels; ). (c) Contrast map for HR versus LR by a two-sample -test (, corrected). (d) The sensorimotor network (SMN), including the supplementary motor area (SMA) and both the right postcentral gyrus (RpostC) and left postcentral gyrus (LpostC), is identified by left central sulcus-seed FC (top 5% voxels; ) in the entire group ().

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