- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Poster: found
FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY WITHIN LANGUAGE REGIONS IN APHASIC PATIENTS DURING REAL-TIME fMRI-BASED NEUROFEEDBACK TRAINING
Abstract
Stroke is known to disrupt connectivity in the brain in addition to forming scars. This study analyzed the connectivity changes within the language regions and the adjoining brain regions during real-time Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-based neurofeedback training for the rehabilitation of stroke-affected patients with expressive aphasia. The study hypothesizes that with repeated sessions of the training, a rise in functional connectivity within the language regions will be observed for the aphasic patients.
The experiment was conducted on three groups of subjects: test patients, control patients, and normal participants. Only the test and the normal groups underwent the training. In the training, the subjects exercised language activity covertly to upregulate the Broca’s area. Neurofeedback of the Broca activity (amplified when it is correlated with the Wernicke activity) is visually presented to the subjects to motivate them to improve their performance and stimulate upregulation of functional connectivity of the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.
The key observations are as follows: For all the groups, a rise in functional connectivity was noticed mostly among the left hemispheric Regions of Interest (ROIs). While comparing the normal group over the test group, ROIs in the frontal polar region were noticed to have good functional connectivity. While comparing the test group over the control group, ROIs in the supra parietal, and the right central opercular regions were found to have good functional connectivity.
This study can contribute to the design of rehabilitative training systems that are tuned to activate the regions that have been observed to show increased functional connectivity.
Content
Author and article information
References
Sreedharan Sujesh, Arun KM, Sylaja PN, Kesavadas Chandrasekharan, Sitaram Ranganatha. Functional Connectivity of Language Regions of Stroke Patients with Expressive Aphasia During Real-Time Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Based Neurofeedback. Brain Connectivity. Vol. 9(8):613–626. 2019. Mary Ann Liebert Inc. [Cross Ref]