Patients

Patients were retrospectively recruited from the Neurosurgery brain tumor service at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis (WUSM), initially as part of an NIH-funded tumor data base grant (CONDR NIH 5R01NS066905). This patient cohort was used in a prior study targeting non-invasive localization of sensorimotor cortex (18). The following inclusion criteria were used: new diagnosis of primary brain tumor; age above 18 years; clinical need for an MRI scan including fMRI for presurgical planning as determined by the treating neurosurgeon. Additionally, we required that the patients have both a language task (word-stem completion) T-fMRI and RS-fMRI. Exclusion criteria included: prior surgery for brain tumor, inability to have an MRI scan, or a patient referred from an outside institute with an MRI scan not performed at WUSM. Our cohort include N = 35 patients (male/female 23/12) with a mean age of 44.8 years (23–71 years range). The mean preoperative enhancing tumor volume was 43.8 mL (range: 1.4–207 mL); 28 patients had a left-hemisphere tumor; pathology was most often oligoastrocytoma (11 cases) and glioblastoma (10 cases). Handedness was recorded in 26 patients. To decrease any uncertainty in regard to laterality we also included the laterality index (LI) for all subjects based on (19). Since the 3 left handed patients had LI > 0, and two of the three patients with LI < 0 were right handed (the handedness on the third was not available) we opted to average language activation in all subjects as a single group. Patient demographics are summarized in Table 1. All aspects of the study were approved by the WUSM Institutional Review Board. Clinical data were acquired during preoperative evaluation and reviewed retrospectively.

Patient clinical and demographic data.

Clinical data for 35 patients with brain tumors (age 44.8 ± 14.0 years; 12 female).