fMRI Wada Test: Prospects for Presurgical Mapping of Language and Memory

Methods of lateralization of language in pre-surgical assessments of children with intractable epilepsy

“…However, in addition to strengthening confidence in findings from other sources, these methods offer an alternative assessment for children who cannot complete the fMRI studies. Although researchers report successful fMRI studies of language with unsedated children as young as six, fMRI studies of language presents a number of challenges that may limit its utility with younger children, including the need to limit movement, the difficulty of monitoring the child's compliance with covert tasks, and the cognitive demanding nature of many of the paradigms [43]. These challenges often limit the success of fMRI studies with children under nine, since young children or children with developmental delays frequently cannot tolerate longer studies or complete the more cognitively demanding tasks necessary to lateralize language [12].…”

Presurgical Evaluation of Patients with Epilepsy— the Wada Test

“…However, this method is less sensitive for bilateral or atypical language representation. [18][19][20] On the other hand, there have been attempts to measure the lateralisation of material-specific memory using various fMRI paradigms. Yet, the concordance between fMRI and the Wada test for memory lateralisation has been less consistent.…”