Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Mapping of the Motor Cortex in Patients with Cerebral Tumors

Abstract

FMRI of tactile, motor, and language tasks is feasible in patients with cerebral tumors. FMRI shows promise as a means of determining the risk of a postoperative motor deficit from surgical resection of frontal or parietal tumors.

Brain Mapping in Sedated Infants and Young Children with Passive-Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

“…Activated cortical regions typically coincide with the expected anatomical domains specific for the function tested. Not only do these domains agree with expected anatomical correlates, but confirmation through electrophysiologic testing has been performed with excellent concordance [1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. …”

“…Third, immature developmental status, especially in the infant population, restricts elaborate language-mapping paradigms currently being used in older children and adults. The preoperative use of fMRI in children has been briefly addressed in previous works [2, 8, 9, 23, 24]. All of these investigators recognized age limitations with functional imaging in children.…”

“…Relative cost, superior spatial resolution and avoidance of either external or intravenous ionizing radiation are issues that favor fMRI as a superior method for functional imaging. The reliability of this technique has been confirmed through conventional methods of brain mapping [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Given this level of reliability, fMRI is currently being utilized as an adjunct for assessing surgical risk and tailoring intraoperative strategy in patients with lesions juxtaposed to functional domains.…”

Bad Mood—Bad Activation?

“…This is clearly supported by several reliability studies, where considerable differences between the results of repeated measurements are reported [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Many factors such as magnetic field inhomogeneities, involuntary movements, respiration, cyclic heart function, and so on do have substantial influence on fMRI results [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Besides these well understood factors, there are less apparent parameters including the subject's attention [10,[27][28][29][30][31] and the subject's emotional state which are discussed to influence fMRI results as well.…”

Clinical applications of functional MRI at 1.0 T: motor and language studies in healthy subjects and patients

“…Assessing the prognostic value of preoperative fMRI studies, Mueller et al observed that in patients with > 2 cm between the margin of the tumor and activated areas, no decline in motor function occurred as a result of tumor resection [10]. Furthermore, the technique has been used to localize cortical motor areas of residual function in the vicinity of intracerebral gliomas in order to direct therapy away from these regions [9].…”