Affiliations: Harold Goodglass Boston University Aphasia Research
Center, Department of Neurology, Boston University School of Medicine and the
Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, USA | University of Colorado at Boulder, Departments of
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences and Neuroscience, USA | Brain Imaging Center, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA and
Harvard Medical School, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Jacquie Kurland, M.S., Aphasia Research
Center (12-A), V.A. Boston Healthcare System, 150 South Huntington Ave.,
Boston, MA 02130 USA. Tel.: +617 232 9500, x 2776; Fax: +617 739 8926; E-mail:
[email protected]
Abstract: Cortical reorganization in poststroke aphasia is not well
understood. Few studies have investigated neural mechanisms underlying language
recovery in severe aphasia patients, who are typically viewed as having a poor
prognosis for language recovery. Although test-retest reliability is routinely
demonstrated during collection of language data in single-subject aphasia
research, this is rarely examined in fMRI studies investigating the underlying
neural mechanisms in aphasia recovery. The purpose of this study was to acquire fMRI test-retest data
examining semantic decisions both within and between two aphasia patients.
Functional MRI was utilized to image individuals with chronic, moderate-severe
nonfluent aphasia during nonverbal, yes/no button-box semantic judgments of
iconic sentences presented in the Computer-assisted Visual Communication
(C-ViC) program. We investigated the critical issue of intra-subject
reliability by exploring similarities and differences in regions of activation
during participants' performance of identical tasks twice on the same day. Each
participant demonstrated high intra-subject reliability, with response
decrements typical of task familiarity. Differences between participants
included greater left hemisphere perilesional activation in the individual with
better response to C-ViC training. This study provides fMRI reliability in
chronic nonfluent aphasia, and adds to evidence supporting differences in
individual cortical reorganization in aphasia recovery.
