Charting Early Brain Plasticity in Radiological Training: Functional Brain Reorganization During Early Radiological...

Radiological expertise draws on semantic knowledge and perceptual-cognitive mechanisms that support diagnostic reasoning. Early radiological training is a formative period when key cognitive processes begin to integrate. Nevertheless, how the brain pattern of early radiological expertise reorganizes during the first weeks of clinical exposure remains unknown, as prior work has relied mainly on cross-sectional designs comparing mature experts to beginners.

We therefore conducted a longitudinal resting-state fMRI study in radiology interns (n = 43; 41 valid) scanned before and after short-term training. Behavioral performance improved significantly after training (p < 0.01). Regional homogeneity (ReHo) was computed for 246 Brainnetome ROIs for each subject.

Using a Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based recursive feature elimination (RFE) pipeline, 14 of these 246 features were identified as most discriminative, spanning regions involved in visual, semantic, memory, attentional, and decision-making processes. An SVM trained on these features effectively differentiated pre- and post-training brain states (training set: 86.67% accuracy, AUC = 0.97; validation set: 81.82% accuracy, AUC = 0.72).

The observed neuroplastic changes provide direct evidence that multidimensional cognitive functions reorganize early in radiological expertise development and offer neural targets to inform evidence-based curriculum design, personalized training, and brain-targeted interventions (e.g., neuromodulation or neurofeedback) in radiology education.