Distributed performance of white matter properties in chess players: A DWI study using automated fiber quantification

The aim of this study is to verify whether anatomical changes occur in the brains of chess players. Besides, it is a potential attempt to evaluate diffusion properties along the tracts due to the diverse situations at anatomical level in different locations; moreover, conventional voxel-based analysis (VBA) has already been used to calculate the average values within the voxels in the investigated regions as analysis data. In this study, we used automated fiber quantification (AFQ) to automatically identify the major tracts that are related to functional domains of the human brain. AFQ can quantify pointwise white matter (WM) properties to detect specific local differences. We selected chess players with superior logical cognition abilities as the carrier to conduct our AFQ experiments. The diffusion properties of the 20 major tracts of professional chess players (n = 28) and matched controls (n = 29) were calculated using diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) data. We noted significant differences (p < 0.05) in the diffusion properties of some successive locations among 100 equidistant points in several tracts, especially in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus(SLF) and right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF). Professional chess players exhibited increase levels in the studied diffusion metrics with Pearson results paralleled the findings. Afterwards, considering the starting and terminating regions of SLF, IFOF, and thalamic radiation, the connectivity of gray matter (GM) where connections are active in the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and thalamus was assessed to help with the further experiment. The results confirmed the tendency in which anatomical alterations generated different performances along the tracts; furthermore, long-term cognitive activities, such as chess, may systematically influence the WM properties of early memory, attention, and visual pathways.