Department of Developmental Neuroscience, IRCCS Stella Maris, Pisa, Italy.
Department of Pediatric Neurology & Developmental Medicine, Children's Hospital, Tübingen, Germany.
Brain Imaging Behav. 2018 Dec;12(6):1775-1785. doi: 10.1007/s11682-018-9848-6.
Clinical functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) requires inferences on localization of major brain functions at the individual subject level. We hypothesized that a single "triple use" task would satisfy sensitivity and reliability requirements for successfully assessing the motor, visual and language domain in this context. This was tested here by the application in a group of healthy adults, assessing sensitivity and reliability at the individual subject level, separately for each domain.Our "triple use" task consisted of 2 conditions (condition 1, assessing motor and visual domain, and condition 2, assessing the language domain), serving mutually as active/control. We included 20 healthy adult subjects. Random effect analyses showed activation in primary motor, visual and language regions, as expected. Less expected regions were activated both for the motor and visual domains. Further, reliability of primary activation patterns was very high across individual subjects, with activation seen in 70-100% of subjects in primary motor, visual, and left-lateralized language regions.These findings suggest the "triple use" task to be reliable at the individual subject's level to assess motor, visual and language domains in the clinical fMRI context. Benefits of such an approach include shortening of acquisition time, simplicity of the task for each domain, and using a visual stimulus. Following establishment of reliability in adults, the task may also be a valuable addition in the pediatric clinical fMRI context, where each of these factors is of high relevance.
临床功能磁共振成像（fMRI）需要在个体受试者水平上推断主要脑功能的定位。我们假设，单一的“三重用途”任务将满足在这种情况下成功评估运动、视觉和语言领域的敏感性和可靠性要求。在这里，通过在一组健康成年人中的应用来测试这一点，分别评估每个领域的个体受试者水平的敏感性和可靠性。我们的“三重用途”任务由 2 个条件组成（条件 1，评估运动和视觉领域，条件 2，评估语言领域），相互作为主动/对照。我们包括 20 名健康成年受试者。随机效应分析显示，主要运动、视觉和语言区域的激活，如预期的那样。不太预期的区域在运动和视觉领域都被激活。此外，个体受试者之间的主要激活模式的可靠性非常高，在原发性运动、视觉和左侧语言区域中，有 70-100%的受试者出现激活。这些发现表明，“三重用途”任务在个体受试者水平上是可靠的，可用于评估临床 fMRI 环境中的运动、视觉和语言领域。这种方法的好处包括缩短采集时间、每个领域任务的简单性以及使用视觉刺激。在成人中建立可靠性后，该任务也可能是儿科临床 fMRI 环境中的一个有价值的补充，这些因素在儿科临床 fMRI 环境中都非常重要。
