Characterizing visual cortical magnification with topological smoothing and optimal transportation

Abstract

Human vision has different concentration on visual fields. Cortical magnification factor (CMF) is a popular measurement on visual acuity and cortex concentration. In order to achieve thorough measurement of CMF across the whole visual field, we propose a method to measure planar CMF upon retinotopic maps generated by pRF decoding, with help of our proposed methods: optimal transportation and topological smoothing. The optimal transportation re-calculates vertex location in retinotopic mapping, and topological smoothing guarantees topological conditions in retinotopic maps, which allow us to calculate planar CMF with the proposed 1-ring patch method. The pipeline was applied to the HCP 7T dataset, giving new planar results on CMF measurement across all 181 subjects, which illustrate novel concentration behavior on visual fields and their individual difference.