Somers Metten, Neggers Sebastiaan F, Diederen Kelly M, Boks Marco P, Kahn René S, Sommer Iris E
Department of Psychiatry, Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, University Medical Center Utrecht Utrecht, Netherlands.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2011 Mar 28;5:31. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00031. eCollection 2011.
Cerebral language lateralization can be assessed in several ways. In healthy subjects, functional MRI (fMRI) during performance of a language task has evolved to be the most frequently applied method. Functional transcranial Doppler (fTCD) may provide a valid alternative, but has been used rarely. Both techniques have their own strengths and weaknesses and as a result may be applied in different fields of research. Until now, only one relatively small study (n = 13) investigated the correlation between lateralization indices (LIs) measured by fTCD and fMRI and showed a remarkably high correlation. To further evaluate the correlation between LIs measured with fTCD and fMRI, we compared LIs of 22 healthy subjects (12 left- and 10 right-handed) using the same word generation paradigm for the fTCD as for the fMRI experiment. LIs measured with fTCD were highly but imperfectly correlated with LIs measured with fMRI (Spearman's rho = 0.75, p < 0.001). The imperfectness of the correlation can partially be explained by methodological restrictions of fMRI as well as fTCD. Our results suggest that fTCD can be a valid alternative for fMRI to measure lateralization, particularly when costs or mobility are important factors in the study design.
脑语言侧化可以通过多种方式进行评估。在健康受试者中，执行语言任务时的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）已逐渐成为最常用的方法。功能性经颅多普勒（fTCD）可能是一种有效的替代方法，但很少被使用。这两种技术都有各自的优缺点，因此可能适用于不同的研究领域。到目前为止，只有一项相对较小的研究（n = 13）调查了fTCD和fMRI测量的侧化指数（LIs）之间的相关性，并显示出非常高的相关性。为了进一步评估fTCD和fMRI测量的LIs之间的相关性，我们使用与fMRI实验相同的单词生成范式，比较了22名健康受试者（12名左利手和10名右利手）的LIs。fTCD测量的LIs与fMRI测量的LIs高度相关但不完全相关（斯皮尔曼等级相关系数rho = 0.75，p < 0.001）。相关性的不完全性可以部分地由fMRI以及fTCD的方法学限制来解释。我们的结果表明，fTCD可以作为fMRI测量侧化的有效替代方法，特别是当成本或可移动性是研究设计中的重要因素时。
