by
Christina Hwang, Contributing Reporter | July 18, 2016
Traditional MR and CT scans do not
measure how brain regions work
together Credit: Joshua Siegel
The severity of a person’s stroke outcome correlates to how their brain’s communication networks are disrupted — something that is not measured by most brain scans — but two new studies show that measuring the damage to brain networks with fMRI may help in stroke treatment and predicting recovery.
Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis wanted to determine whether functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) could provide information for examining stroke damage.
They used fcMRI, which identifies large disruptions in the brain after a stroke, to analyze the how networks in the brain communicated in 130 stroke patients and 31 people who did not experience a stroke. They also gave the patients neuropsychological tests to measure their vision, motor function, language ability, visual memory, verbal memory and attention.
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“The holy grail of predicting stroke recovery is to develop an individualized algorithm that will reliably tell us, ‘This patient will recover 85 percent of his abilities and that patient only 55 percent,’” said Dr. Maurizio Corbetta, the Norman J. Stupp professor of radiology and senior author of both studies, in a statement.
The researchers found that the size and location of the patient’s brain lesions were related to vision and motor problems, but memory problems were better explained by changes in the brain network connections. To predict the patient’s attention and language problems, the researchers needed to know both the brain lesions and the brain network.
“For memory, it turns out that it’s not damage to a specific location that really matters but whether the connections between locations are intact,” said graduate student Joshua Siegel, in a statement.
Understanding the networks of connections between brain regions — as depicted in the following image — and how they are changed by a stroke is vital to understanding how stroke patients heal, according to the research.
As of now, fcMRI is not used in clinical settings, according to the announcement, and the MR and CT scans that are used to assess stroke damage don’t measure how well different brain regions work together.
