BACKGROUND

Tractography allows the in vivo study of subcortical white matter, and it is a potential tool for providing predictive indices on post-operative outcomes. We aim at establishing whether there is a relation between cognitive outcome and the status of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus's (IFOF's) microstructure.

METHODS

The longitudinal neuropsychological data of thirty young (median age: 35 years) patients operated on for DLGG in the left temporo-insular cortex along with pre-surgery tractography data were processed.

RESULTS

A degraded integrity of the left (vs. right) IFOF (lower fractional anisotropy and length, < 0.001; higher mean and axial diffusivity, < 0.01) was found, with lower microstructural variables in the infiltration (vs. dislocation) group. Significant decreases immediately post-surgery vs. pre-surgery mainly occurred in lexico-semantics ( < 0.001), with significant improvements at follow-up in all the tests ( < 0.01 to < 0.001), despite values in the range of 44% to 47.82% of patients with below cut-off scores regarding naming verbs and making visual lexical decisions. The status of left and right IFOFs is predictive of a decrease in immediate post-surgery performance for several tests ( < 0.05); similarly, it is predictive of better recovery in the follow-up performance for naming nouns, naming verbs, making phonological fluency lexical decisions, and the token test ( < -0.05). For the ROC analysis, a significant result was obtained for the verb-naming test, with a cut-off of 79%.

CONCLUSIONS

This study supports the role of the predictive value of pre-operative tractography for assessing the immediate post-operative result and at follow-up the risk of developing a cognitive deficit.