Studying Cortical Plasticity in Ophthalmic and Neurological Disorders: From Stimulus-Driven to Cortical Circuitry Modeling Approaches

Box 3

Connective field modeling.

The CF model, as originally proposed by Haak and colleagues, assumes a circularly symmetric 2D Gaussian model on the surface of the source region as the integration field from the source to the target [66]. This 2D Gaussian is defined by its position (v0) and size (σ), where d(v,v0) is the shortest distance between the voxel v and the connective field center v0 and σ is the Gaussian spread (mm). Distances are calculated across the cortical surface, using Dijkstra’s algorithm [66, 69]. The connective field pipeline is described in Figure 4.