Mapping Language in Epilepsy with Functional Imaging

Surgery is an important therapeutic alternative for patients with uncontrolled epilepsy. Preoperative identification of brain regions important for language is important to reduce the risk of functional impairment after surgery. The Wada test suffers from several technical and clinical disadvantages and provides hemispheric data at best. More invasive methods such as intraoperative or chronic subdural cortical mapping have more limited application. New approaches using neuroimaging methods offer the opportunity to localize, as well as lateralize, language. In addition, normal volunteers can be studied with the same techniques, providing comparative and control data. Although most normal studies have been reported as group data, it is important for individual scans to be available for comparison with patient studies to understand the normal range of interindividual variability. Two techniques, PET with 15O-water-PET and fMRI, have been used. Both detect signal changes associated with increased regional blood flow during neuronal activity. Usually, scans performed during a language task are compared with those obtained during control conditions. It is important to choose activation tasks carefully, to make sure one is imaging activation associated with the particular process of interest. PET has advantages, including a fully diffusible tracer, standardized analytic methods, a more comfortable environment, and less sensitivity to movement artifact. On the other hand, it involves a cyclotron-produced tracer, radiation exposure, and is more difficult to repeat. FMRI over represents the effects of large vascular structures and is very sensitive to movement but uses widely available equipment and has no limitation on the number of studies. For both studies, it is important to understand the potential effects of such factors as attention, fatigue, and familiarity with the material. Several studies comparing 15O-water-PET and fMRI to the Wada test found that the former are at least as accurate for language lateralization. In addition, we compared 15O-water-PET to direct subdural electrode cortical stimulation and found that regions showing increased cerebral blood flow during naming tasks co-registered with subdural electrodes that disrupted language during electrical stimulation. In this and other studies, PET detected more regions than electrical stimulation techniques. The whole brain cannot be covered with electrodes, but some areas participating in a task may not be crucial for it. FMRI is particularly useful for children. We compared cortical activation patterns in normal children, adolescents, and adults. The activation patterns, and laterality of language dominance, in children 8 years and above, were similar to adults, although some differences could reflect maturation and evolving focality of cognitive processes. In children with epilepsy, fMRI successfully identified language laterality and provided data on intrahemispheric localization. Studies also showed the effects of the epileptic focus on normal activation patterns for several tasks. Neuroimaging functional mapping is an important tool, still in the process of development and evolution. Although potentially of great clinical and scientific value, it should be used and interpreted cautiously.