Introducing NBML, its goals, and its services

Gholam Ali Hossein-Zadeh, PhD (Deputy of scientific and technology, NBML, Associate Professor, BioElectric, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran)

Title of the Talk: Introducing NBML, its goals, and its services.

Abbas Babajani-Feremi, PhD (Assistant Prof., Department of Pediatrics, Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of Tennessee Health Science Center)

Title of the Talk: Presurgical Language Mapping in Patients with Epilepsy: a Multi-modal Approach Using fMRI, TMS, MEG, and ECoG

Abstract:

One of the goals in neurosurgery is to resect pathological brain tissue, while minimizing postsurgical functional impairments. In view of inter-individual variability in functional anatomy, especially for language, it becomes necessary to perform presurgical functional mapping and assess the risk of neurological impairments following surgery on an individual basis.  Cortical stimulation mapping (CSM) is the conventional clinical standard-of-care for functional mapping, though it has several limitations. For example, CSM can produce after-discharges and electrically-induced seizures that put the patient at risk and make additional immediate testing problematic or even. Furthermore, CSM is time-consuming and requires patient cooperation that makes functional mapping in young, uncooperative, and developmentally delayed patients quite challenging.

Given the limitations of CSM, other functional mapping approaches have been developed, including high gamma electrocorticography (hgECoG), fMRI, TMS, and MEG. A multi-modality language mapping approach using fMRI, hgECoG,TMS and MEG can complement, or in some cases even replace CSM given the complementary nature of these modalities and their ability to assess different aspects of neurophysiological task-specific activation. In other words, there is considerable concordance between CSM, hgECoG, fMRI, TMS, and MEG language mapping. The results reveal that hgECoG, fMRI, and TMS are valuable tools for presurgical language mapping.

Sohrab Shahzadi, MD (Professor of Functional Neurosurgery, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences)

Title of the Talk: Some More Invasive Procedures for Brain Mapping

Abstract:  The purpose of brain mapping is to advance the understanding of the relationship between structure and function in the human brain. Scientists in this field seek to gain knowledge of the physical processes that underlie human sensation, attention awareness and cognition. These results are immediately applicable to surgical intervention, to the design of medical interventions and to the treatment of psychological and psychiatric disorders. Historically, some brain disorders like tumors, brain infectious, and trauma help scientists to find the map of the human brain and develop neurosurgery techniques.  Additionally, Parkinson disease (PD) is very helpful to recognize the function of different brain parts as surgeons can do brain mapping while patients are awake. Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder of the nervous system that affects movement. It develops gradually, sometimes starting with a barely noticeable tremor in just one hand. But while a tremor may be the most well-known sign of PD, the disorder also commonly causes stiffness or slowing of movement. In advanced PD, patients cannot even eat anything or sleep, so the disease may totally disturb the patient’s life. Treating motor symptoms with surgery was once a common practice, but since the discovery of medicines, the number of operations declined. Studies in the past few decades have led to great improvements in surgical techniques, so that surgery is again being used in people with advanced PD for whom drug therapy is no longer sufficient.