Intraoperative cortical recordings during speaking tasks

ALAN TAITZ; WALTER SILVA; MARÍA DEL CARMEN GARCÍA; EZEQUIEL GOLDSCHMIDT; CARLOS CIRAOLO; CLAUDIO YAMPOLSKY; MARCOS TREVISAN; GABRIEL MINDLIN

Congreso; SAN 2015; 2015

Subdural electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings in patients performing a speaking task are associated with event-related broadband gamma activity in a high frequency range (HG) (>60 Hz) [1][2]. Some works suggest the utility of this HG activity for mapping language cortex, by comparing its neuroanatomical distribution with the one obtained with electrical cortical stimulation (ECS), which remains the standard for predicting functional impairment after surgery for epilepsy, tumor or vascular malformations [3]. We hypothesize that ECoG recordings could be used to complement ECS during surgical intervention to map language cortex by an on-line analysis of HG activity during intra-operative speaking tasks. We asked four patients implanted with subdural multi-electrode superficial arrays to do an overt single-phoneme repetition task study. One of them was an epileptic patient that completed the study over 3 sessions during monitoring, and the others had brain tumors and completed a single, short session intra-operatively. Here we show our preliminar results and compare the performance of the different cortical recordings.