Purpose: To assess current clinical practices throughout Europe with respect to acquisition, implementation, evaluation, and interpretation of language functional MRI (fMRI) in epilepsy patients. Methods: An online survey was emailed to all European Society of Neuroradiology members (n = 1662), known associates (n = 6400), and 64 members of European Epilepsy network. The questionnaire featured 40 individual items on demographic data, clinical practice and indications, fMRI paradigms, radiological workflow, data post-processing protocol, and reporting. Results: A total of 49 non-duplicate entries from European centers were received from 20 countries. Of these, 73.5% were board-certified neuroradiologists and 69.4% had an in-house epilepsy surgery program. Seventy-one percent of centers performed fewer than five scans per month for epilepsy. The most frequently used paradigms were phonemic verbal fluency (47.7%) and auditory comprehension (55.6%), but variants of 13 paradigms were described. Most centers assessed the fMRI task performance (75.5%), ensured cognitive-task adjustment (77.6%), trained the patient before scanning (85.7%), and assessed handedness (77.6%), but only 28.6% had special paradigms for patients with cognitive impairments. fMRI was post-processed mainly by neuroradiologists (42.1%), using open-source software (55.0%). Reporting was done primarily by neuroradiologists (74.2%). Interpretation was done mainly by visual inspection (65.3%). Most specialists (81.6%) were able to determine the hemisphere dominance for language in more than 75% of exams, attributing failure to the patient not performing the task correctly. Conclusion: This survey shows that language fMRI is firmly embedded in the preoperative management of epilepsy patients. The wide variety of paradigms and the use of non-CE-marked software underline the need for establishing reference standards.

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doi.org/10.1007/s00234-020-02397-w, hdl.handle.net/1765/125597
Neuroradiology: a journal devoted to neuroimaging and interventional neuroradiology
Department of Radiology

Bargalló, N. (N.), Cano-López, I. (I.), Rosazza, C. (C.), Vernooij, M., Smits, M., Vitali, P. (P.), … Yousry, T. (T.). (2020). Clinical practice of language fMRI in epilepsy centers: a European survey and conclusions by the ESNR Epilepsy Working Group. Neuroradiology: a journal devoted to neuroimaging and interventional neuroradiology. doi:10.1007/s00234-020-02397-w