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Abstract Modern neurosurgical techniques aim to maximize both the survival rates of patients with resectable intracranial pathology and their quality of life following surgical intervention. The preservation of basic motor function is of great importance to the latter, particularly that of hand movement. Functional MRI has shown tremendous potential as a noninvasive tool for preoperative planning by combining anatomic definition with physiologic information to demonstrate the spatial relationship between functionally eloquent brain regions and intracranial tumor. Functional MR imaging can be used to identify eloquent cortical regions, particularly when these cortical regions are displaced or reorganized secondary to pathologic processes, and can facilitate the assessment of potential neurosurgical risks. This study highlights the role of BOLD based fMRI in making brain tumor surgery safer. Functional MRI has been successfully used to localize the eloquent brain regions and map their proximity to the brain tumors leading to better tumor resection with less damage to important functional brain areas. Thus maximizing the survival rates&surgical outcome as well as minimizing postoperative neurological deficits. The diagnostic advantages of presurgical functional neuroimaging are that it is non-invasive and doesn’t involve radiation or radioactive isotopes injection, making it safe for localization of eloquent brain areas with respect to the invisaged site of surgery, Determination of the dominant hemisphere for specific brain functions & Delineation of neuroplastic changes in brain activity . In conclusion Preoperative fMRI is reasonably accurate in providing noninvasive localization of the different representations of the human body in the primary motor and somatosensory cortex, language localization and lateralization as well as visual & auditory cortex, prior to brain lesion surgery. fMRI can be considered as an easy & noninvasive modern diagnostic tool that influences the diagnostic and therapeutic decisions of the neurosurgical team in patients with resectable brain tumors. It also opens up a new diagnostic field of neuroradiology, with a shift from strictly morphological imaging to measurement and visualization of brain function. |