The Study of Seafarer's Brain Functional Connectivity Before and After Sailling Using fMRI

Abstract

As a special professional group, the seafarers' psychological health is very important to the safety of shipping, and has drawn great attention from the industry. As an emerging neuroimaging technique, functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) has been widely applied to the field of mental health research. In this paper, in order to explore the possible influence of maritime working and living environments on the brain functional network of seafarers, a new method of functional connectivity detection is proposed to obtain more accurate brain functional networks, which is implemented by using the classical independent component analysis (ICA) method with intrinsic priori information from the fMRI data itself. Finally, the experimental results of real seafarers' fMRI data demonstrate that the functional connectivity of seafarers has been changed before and after sailing.