BOLD fMRI for Presurgical Planning: Part I

The goal of this chapter is to provide the reader with a comprehensive review of the current applications of presurgical language mapping by Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI). The first part of the chapter includes a review of the physical principles, data acquisition, and data analysis techniques of BOLD fMRI followed by an introduction to the clinical applications of functional imaging accompanied by a discussion of its limitations. In the second part, after a description of the most commonly used paradigms in clinical language fMRI, a review of the major studies available in the literature pertaining to clinical validation of fMRI for language localization and lateralization is presented, and two illustrative cases of patients treated at our institution for brain tumors involving language cortex are presented.