Domenico Zac1, Joshua Nickerson2, Gerard Deib1, Jay J. Pillai1
1Division of Neuroradiology Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States; 2Division of Neuroradiology, The University of Vermont School of Medicine, Burlington, VT, United States
Language hemispheric dominance determined by BOLD fMRI can depend on the paradigm as well as the region of interest (ROI) considered for the lateralization index (LI) computation. In this retrospective study of 41 brain tumor patients referred for presurgical language mapping we compared the effectiveness of lateralization of four language tasks in anatomical and functional language ROIs. Two expressive tasks, rhyming and silent word generation, were the best lateralizing tasks in expressive ROIs, whereas the receptive and semantic tasks, sentence completion and listening comprehension, did not perform better than the expressive tasks for lateralization in receptive ROIs.