Investigation of Local White Matter Properties in Professional Chess Player: A Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study Based on Automatic Annotation Fiber Clustering

This article investigates whether the white matter (WM) anatomical changes exist in the brain of professional chess players. Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) and fiber tracking provide a unique, noninvasive technique to study brain WM microstructures in vivo. However, existing methods focused on the entire tracts without detailed anatomical annotation, which depended on expert neuroanatomical knowledge to subdivide and annotate fiber tracts. This article used an automatically annotated fiber clustering method to identify anatomically meaningful WM structures from the whole brain's tractography. Each fiber was resampled to 200 equally spaced nodes along the whole tract to detect local differences. We calculated diffusion characteristics for 4 regions and 64 fiber clusters of professional chess players (n = 28) and matched controls (n = 29). The experimental results showed that there were significant differences in the diffusion characteristics of continuous locations in the thalamofrontal tracts and left superior longitudinal fasciculus. Pearson correlation analysis was also performed to prove our results. Professional chess players are significantly correlated with training duration and training frequency. Their brain structures have changed due to cognitive aspects, such as learning and memory. It is very meaningful to study the cognitive mechanism of change, which can improve high-level cognitive ability.

Automated summary

This study used a new method to investigate the white matter microstructure changes in the brain of professional chess players and found significant differences in diffusion characteristics in the thalamofrontal tracts and left superior longitudinal fasciculus. The changes in brain structures of professional chess players are mainly related to cognitive aspects such as learning and memory, and studying this cognitive mechanism is of great significance.