Objective It was explored that the brain plasticity mechanism caused by table tennis can make good contributions to analyzing the insight features of table tennis itself, which will provide potent scientific basis for table tennis training, monitoring and evaluation. Based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), it was aimed to explore the plasticity of brain activity in table tennis athletes with different training levels on the time scale with dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation(dALFF).
Methods The table tennis professional athletes(PA), sports college student athletes(SCSA)and gender and age matched normal controls(NC) were recruited. Resting-stated functional magnetic resonance imaging(rs-fMRI) data were collected, and dALFF of each individual was calculated.The three groups of dALFF maps were tested by oneway analysis of variance(ANOVA), and extracted the value of dALFF in the brain regions showing statistic differences of one-way ANOVA for the post-hoc test using the two-sample t-test by Bonferroni correction. In addition, Pearson correlation analysis was performed among the dALFF values of the significantly different regions and weekly training durations.
Results It was found that the three groups had significant differences in dALFF values of the left cerebellum and middle temporal gyrus (voxel P < 0.01, cluster P < 0.05, GRF corrected, voxel size> 40). Further post-hoc tests showed that the dALFF values of left cerebellum in SCSA group and PA group were both higher than that in NC group(P < 0.05), while the dALFF value of left middle temporal gyrus in SCSA group was higher than that in PA group and NC group(P < 0.05). The dALFF values of the left cerebellum and middle temporal gyrus in three groups showed a trend of changing from high to low as SCSA > PA > NC. The dALFF values of the left cerebellum and the left middle temporal gyrus in SCSA group were both negatively correlated with the weekly training durations(r=-0.4382, -0.4115; P < 0.05).
Conclusions Table tennis training can cause changes in brain plasticity. Under different training load of table tennis athletes, changes occurred on cerebral functional areas related to motor balance and visual motor coordination. The variability of local brain spontaneous activity of table tennis athletes is stronger in the early stage than that in the later stage. As the time span of training increases, the brain spontaneous activity tends to be stable.
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