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Updated: May 4, 2026
Translational Brain Mapping at the University of Rochester Medical Center: Preserving the Mind Through Personalized Brain Mapping
Published on: August 12, 2019
Cerebrovascular reactivity mapping in patients with low grade gliomas undergoing presurgical sensorimotor mapping
Domenico Zacà1, Jorge Jovicich, Sreenivasan R Nadar
1Division of Neuroradiology, Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA; Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.
Purpose:
(i) to validate blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) breathhold cerebrovascular reactivity (BH CVR) mapping as an effective technique for potential detection of neurovascular uncoupling (NVU) in a cohort of patients with perirolandic low grade gliomas undergoing presurgical functional MRI (fMRI) for sensorimotor mapping, and (ii) to determine whether NVU potential, as assessed by BH CVR mapping, is prevalent in this tumor group.
Materials And Methods:
We retrospectively evaluated 12 patients, with histological diagnosis of grade II glioma, who performed multiple motor tasks and a BH task. Sensorimotor activation maps and BH CVR maps were compared in two automatically defined regions of interest (ROIs), ipsilateral to the lesion (i.e., ipsilesional) and contralateral to the lesion (i.e., contralesional).
Results:
Motor task mean T-value was significantly higher in the contralesional ROIs (6.00 ± 1.74 versus 4.34 ± 1.68; P = 0.00004) as well as the BH mean T-value (4.74 ± 2.30 versus 4.09 ± 2.50; P = 0.009). The number of active voxels was significantly higher in the contralesional ROIs (Z = 2.99; P = 0.03). Actual NVU prevalence was 75%.
Conclusion:
Presurgical sensorimotor fMRI mapping can be affected by NVU-related false negative activation in low grade gliomas (76% of analyzed tasks).
