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Reproducibility of hemispheric blood flow increases during line bisectioning
Agnes Flöel1, Hubertus Lohmann, Caterina Breitenstein
1Department of Neurology, University Hospital of Münster, University of Münster, Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse 33, Münster, Germany. floeel@uni-muenster.de
Objectives:
To determine if attention-related changes of hemispheric perfusion increases, as assessed by blood-flow sensitive techniques, are as reliable as language-related hemispheric perfusion increases.
Methods:
The reproducibility of hemispheric blood flow velocity increases during a line bisection task was assessed with functional transcranial Doppler sonography.
Results:
Over repeated examinations, the index of lateralization of 20 healthy subjects showed a high test-retest reproducibility (r=0.9, P<0.01). No practice effects were detected over the course of 10 re-assessments of one subject.
Conclusions:
Hemispheric lateralization of visuospatial attention is a robust phenomenon and can be reliably determined using perfusion sensitive measurements. Future studies should focus on investigating lesion-related reorganization of attentional processing with blood-flow sensitive techniques.