Poster B25, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Brain mapping during awake surgeries: 10 years of studies on the neurobiology of language
Sylvie Moritz-Gasser1,2,3;1CHU Montpellier, Department of Neurosurgery, 2Montpellier University, Department of Speech-Language Therapy, 3Institute of Neuroscience of Montpellier, Inserm U1051
Brain mapping performed during awake surgery for diffuse low-grade glioma allows the neurosurgeon to address the twin challenges of maximizing the tumor resection while preserving functional networks, following a well-described procedure (Duffau, 2009). Briefly, a standard battery of language evaluation is administered to the patient by a speech-language therapist in the surgery theatre (as well as just before and a few days after the surgery) while the neurosurgeon applies direct electrical stimulations on the exposed cortical and subcortical surface of the brain using a bipolar electrode. When a disorder is elicited reproducibly during a direct electrical stimulation (e.g. anomia, paraphasia, reading disorder), the stimulated site is considered as functional and then preserved. All positive stimulation sites are marked with a tag number and tumor removal is thus achieved according to individual functional boundaries. Beyond its evident clinical relevance, this technique allows to establish very accurate anatomo-functional correlations and then brings precious lights in the field of the neurobiology of language. We propose to present here the major findings came out from the study of these anatomo-functional correlations by our team these last ten years, and based on more than 500 surgeries. We will thus address the neurobiology of multimodal semantic processing, of lexical retrieval, of reading, of stuttering, of mentalizing, and subsequently explore the neural foundations of the dual-stream model of speech-language processing, at the cortical and subcortical levels. We will finally conclude on the perspectives brought by these findings concerning the comprehension of aphasic clinical presentations and consequently language rehabilitation.
Themes: History of the Neurobiology of Language, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Behavioral