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Purpose: To evaluate CT and MRI features and long term imaging follow-up of a large series of dysembryoplastic neuroepithelial tumors (DNTS)., Patients and Methods: We retrospectively analyzed CT (100%) and MR imaging (83%) findings of 53 patients with complex (n = 14), simple (n = 6) or non specific histological forms (n = 33) of DNTS. All patients underwent epilepsy surgery for the treatment of drug resistant partial seizures. Preoperative radiological follow-up from two to 10 years (81%) and a post-operative follow-up from one to 13 years (92%) were available., Results: DNTs are intracortical tumors with no mass effect and no peritumoral edema. An associated deformity of the overlying skull was observed in 44% of the 34 patients with a cortical lesion of the convexity. We found a contrast enhancement of the lesion in 21% of cases, a calcic hyperdensity in 36% of cases and a cystic part in 7.5% of cases. DNTs were hypodense (82%) on CT examinations and had a decreased signal on the T1 Weighted Images (95%) and a hypersignal in T2 Weighted Images (100%) on MR imaging. Eighty-one percent of patients had a mean preoperative radiological follow-up of four years and the tumor was stable in size in all cases; 92% of patients had a mean post-operative radiological follow-up of 4.5 years and no recurrence was seen., Conclusion: Three radiological features of DNTs are helpful for the diagnosis: cortical location, absence of mass effect and no surrounding edema. Clinical, radiological and histopathological findings have to be considered together in order to assess the diagnosis and to differentiate DNTs, which are stable lesions from gliomas.

Neuropsychological studies have revealed different subtypes of dyscalculia, including dissociations between exact calculation and approximation abilities, and an impact of number size on performance. To understand the origins of these effects, we measured cerebral activity with functional MRI at 3 Tesla and event-related potentials while healthy volunteers performed exact and approximate calculation tasks with small and large numbers. Bilateral intraparietal, precentral, dorsolateral and superior prefrontal regions showed greater activation during approximation, while the left inferior prefrontal cortex and the bilateral angular regions were more activated during exact calculation. Increasing number size during exact calculation led to increased activation in the same bilateral intraparietal regions as during approximation, as well the left inferior and superior frontal gyri. Event-related potentials gave access to the temporal dynamics of calculation processes, showing that effects of task and of number size could be found as early as 200-300 ms following problem presentation. Altogether, the results reveal two cerebral networks for number processing. Rote arithmetic operations with small numbers have a greater reliance on left-lateralized regions, presumably encoding numbers in verbal format. Approximation and exact calculation with large numbers, however, put heavier emphasis on the left and right parietal cortices, which may encode numbers in a non-verbal quantity format. Subtypes of dyscalculia can be explained by lesions disproportionately affecting only one of these networks.