Task-Based Presurgical Functional MRI in Patients with Brain Tumors

Neurosurgery in functionally important brain areas carries a high risk for postoperative neurological deficits. In patients with brain tumors, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) facilitates presurgical planning and evaluation of surgical outcome for the estimation of an as good as possible balance between maximal tumor resection and minimal loss of function. To this end fMRI is also applied intraoperatively for functional neuronavigation preferably in combination with DTI-tractography. However, fMRI has not reached the status of a standard diagnostic neuroimaging procedure, yet. Preoperative task-based fMRI represents the best established and validated clinical application of fMRI, is increasingly performed in larger medical neurocenters, and in this context can only be performed exclusively in individual patients. Therefore, it differs fundamentally from research application in neuroscience.