Clinical and Research Applications of Functional MRI

Dear Colleagues,

Functional MRI has become the tool of choice to evaluate mental processes in healthy people and in pathological conditions. In the fields of neurology, neuropsychology, clinical neuroscience, and cognitive psychiatry, fMRI is currently used to assess the cerebral correlates of sensori-motor, language, memory, emotion and executive functions. An important field of research is the study of functional plasticity and brain reorganization after cerebral dysfunction, and the relationship between cerebral networks’ reorganization and functional recovery, in terms of behavioral measure. This raises an interesting debate concerning efficient vs. inefficient patterns of reorganization. Moreover, research on functional plasticity helps develop new neurorehabilitation methods to improve recovery based on individual assessment, tailored to the cognitive and cerebral profiles of each patient. Functional MRI is also currently used in clinical settings before surgery to map cognitive functions and avoid post-surgical deficits. This is typically the case in patients with focal and drug-resistant epilepsy; many studies have evaluated the potential of fMRI to replace classical gold-standard methods. In neurosurgical practice, fMRI can also evaluate characteristics of postoperative neurological deficits including their occurrence, clinical presentation and duration, helping to inform patients and to prepare postoperative care. In psychiatric patients, numerous studies using fMRI have identified anatomo-functional correlates of cognitive dysfunctions associated with pathologies such as bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism and schizophrenia. Moreover, fMRI has revealed patterns of reorganization in psychiatric patients after rehabilitation based on various methods and techniques, including psycho-education. Finally, cerebrovascular reactivity imaging has become an interesting approach that can provide new insights into vascular function and its relation with cognitive correlates as assessed with fMRI. Critically, despite some methodological and practical issues, fMRI data has been validated by different techniques (MEG, Wada test, electrical stimulations, and surgical resections). Overall, in the last decades, fMRI has become one of the most widely used functional imaging techniques in clinical neuroscience, neuropsychology and cognitive psychiatry.

Prof. Dr. Monica Baciu
Guest Editor

Dr. Marcela Perrone-Bertolotti
Co-Guest Editor

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• Functional MRI
• Sensori-motor function
• Cognition (language, memory, executive functions,)
• Neurology
• Neuropsychology
• Cognitive psychiatry
• Plasticity, recovery, reorganization
• Surgery
• Cerebrovascular reactivity