Stereotaxic display of brain lesions

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Rorden, Chris | Brett, Matthew

Affiliations: University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK | MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK

Note: [] School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. Tel.: +44 115 951 5294; Fax: +44 115 951 5324; E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Traditionally lesion location has been reported using standard templates, text based descriptions or representative raw slices from the patient's CT or MRI scan. Each of these methods has drawbacks for the display of neuroanatomical data. One solution is to display MRI scans in the same stereotaxic space popular with researchers working in functional neuroimaging. Presenting brains in this format is useful as the slices correspond to the standard anatomical atlases used by neuroimagers. In addition, lesion position and volume are directly comparable across patients. This article describes freely available software for presenting stereotaxically aligned patient scans. This article focuses on MRI scans, but many of these tools are also applicable to other modalities (e.g. CT, PET and SPECT). We suggest that this technique of presenting lesions in terms of images normalized to standard stereotaxic space should become the standard for neuropsychological studies.

Journal: Behavioural Neurology, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 191-200, 2000