The future of functionally-related structural change assessment

The brain is continually changing its function and structure in response to changing environmental demands. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods can be used to repeatedly scan the same individuals over time and in this way have provided powerful tools for assessing such brain change. Functional MRI has provided important insights into changes that occur with learning or recovery but this review will focus on the complementary information that can be provided by structural MRI methods. Structural methods have been powerful in indicating when and where changes occur in both gray and white matter with learning and recovery. However, the measures that we derive from structural MRI are typically ambiguous in biological terms. An important future challenge is to develop methods that will allow us to determine precisely what has changed. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.