Prognosis and Recovery of Motor Function with Lesion–Symptom Mapping in Patients with Stroke

ABSTRACT

Although studies have demonstrated that several specific brain lesions are related to the recovery and functional prognosis in patients with stroke, it still remained to be illusive. Modern imaging techniques make us possible to identify regions that are commonly related to specific deficit. Superimposing individual lesions to identify an area related to a particular function is based on the assumption that these functional modules are in the same location in different individuals. It is traditional to overlay plots using ‘lesion subtraction.’ Additionally, voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) can be used to determine relationships between behavioral measures and its neural correlates in the brain. VLSM estimates statistical parameters on a voxel-by-voxel basis by calculating the correlations between t-scores for tasks and treating voxels as subjects, allowing fairly high spatial precision. Understanding their relative merits with regard to specific brain lesions should be useful in planning rehabilitation strategies and will become an important part of neurorehabilitation.