RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Mapping the Functional Anatomy of Sentence Comprehension and Application to Presurgical Evaluation of Patients with Brain Tumor
JF American Journal of Neuroradiology
JO Am. J. Neuroradiol.
FD American Society of Neuroradiology
SP 1461
OP 1468
VO 26
IS 6
A1 Manzar Ashtari
A1 Kenneth Perrine
A1 Rania Elbaz
A1 Uzma Syed
A1 Emily Thaden
A1 Carolyn McIlree
A1 Rima Dolgoff-Kaspar
A1 Tana Clarke
A1 Alan Diamond
A1 Alan Ettinger
YR 2005
UL http://www.ajnr.org/content/26/6/1461.abstract
AB BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The main clinical indication for functional MR imaging (fMRI) has been to preoperatively map the cortex. Motor paradigms to activate the cortex are simple and robust; however, language tasks show greater variability and difficulty. The aim of this study was to develop a language task with an adequate control task to engage the areas of the posterior temporal lobe responsible for sentence comprehension.METHODS: We performed a cloze paradigm requiring silent reading of a visually presented sentence-completion task based on semantic meaning versus a letter-scanning epoch requiring the completion of nonlinguistic strings or a rest period. Before this task was clinically used in two patients epilepsy and cavernous angioma, its feasibility and accuracy were tested in 14 healthy right-handed participants.RESULTS: Results showed significant activation of the posterior temporal cortex, including a broad area across the posterior left temporal cortex extending into the inferior parietal lobule. When the sentence completion–minus-letter string task was compared with the sentence completion–minus-rest task, increased activation was present in the posterior temporal lobe.CONCLUSION: Decreased significant activation during the sentence completion–minus-rest contrast may be attributed to increased noise from intersubject variability in the rest period. Our results suggest that this task elucidates areas important to reading comprehension in the posterior and inferior temporal regions that verbal fluency and auditory discrimination tasks do not. Data from two cases are summarized to exemplify the input of this task for neurosurgery.