Blindness, a serious eye condition, is a worldwide health concern. A variety of eye diseases including amblyopia, glaucoma, optic neuritis, and eye trauma can lead to blindness. The common feature of these eye diseases is visual deprivation. Visual deprivation leads to cross-modal plasticity in the visual cortex of the human brain. Visual experience plays a major role in promoting the development of visual cortex during the critical development periods. Blindness leads to alterations in the functional organization and the connectivity of the occipital cortex. In addition, a vision-deprived occipital cortex will shift to the processing of auditory perception, language perception, and somatosensory perception. Vision deprivation also leads to altered brain activities in other sensory cortices as well as higher cognitive function. Therefore, the diagnosis and treatment of blinding eye diseases should not only focus on the eyeball itself, but also pay attention to the changes of the patient’s brain structure and function. Functional MRI techniques with high spatial and temporal resolution have the potential to determine the neuropathological mechanisms of blinding eye diseases. Therefore, neuroimaging studies focusing on blinding eye diseases are worthy of further development.

Elucidate the neuropathological mechanisms of blinding eye diseases after visual deprivation and exploring the potential neuroimaging biomarkers for diagnosis and prediction of treatment response or outcome is an important field of research. The visual pathways are functionally divided into ventral and dorsal streams. A number of studies have demonstrated that visual deprivation leads to abnormal brain activities in different parts of visual pathways. However, some of the results were inconsistent. Moreover, the functional connectivity between the visual area and other sensory cortices were little known. The continuous development of functional MRI and its derived analytical methods provide us with new opportunities to explore the neuropathological changes in blinding eye diseases.

Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to collect studies which used functional MRI and these analytical methods to explore the characteristic changes in the structure and function of the nervous system in the patients after visual deprivation, and its value in diagnosis and treatment evaluation. This Special Issue will welcome original research studies and reviews which applied functional MRI and its derived novel algorithms to investigate the alterations in the structure, function, and metabolism of brain regions in the blinding eye diseases.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• fMRI study on diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, and cerebral infarction
• DTI study on diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, and cerebral infarction
• ASL study on diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, and cerebral infarction
• T1 study on diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa, and cerebral infarction