Evaluating the Relationship Between Motor and Cognitive Impairment and Lesion Size and Location Post-Stroke Using CT...

With stroke being the leading cause of disability worldwide, there is a need to improve current rehabilitative care. Stroke causes brain damage in the form of a lesion, resulting in both cognitive and motor deficits. Clinicians often rely on functional behavior to determine treatment directions; however, behavioral deficit may not represent the neural damage. Understanding how the neural damage influences the behavioral impairments with stroke subjects could allow clinicians to provide a more personalized therapeutic plan. Focusing on global accessibility, CT-scans were used to image the lesion given that it is an affordable imaging modality that is used world-wide. Eleven chronic stroke patients were mapped into functional groups by their motor and cognitive behavior and their CT-scans was used to quantify lesion volume and define how the volume location mapped unto the whole brain areas at different granular levels. Our main findings were that lesion size may not be a good indicator of behavioral deficit. These results suggest that assessing brain areas more granularly may show larger differences in behavior.