Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

The Clinical Epilepsy Section has long used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to localize cortical language function, with the clinical goal of surgical planning and the theoretical goal of characterizing atypical language organization in patient populations. The aim of my research is to adapt these language paradigms to magnetoencephalography (MEG). I have two main goals: 1) to derive measures of language localization from the MEG signal (using beamformers) that concord with fMRI and 2) to investigate the spectrotemporal properties of the cortical activity that associated with language processing by exploiting the superior temporal resolution of MEG.

I began this project last summer and continued my research over the winter. During this time I have been involved in all aspects of the project, including subject recruitment, experimental design, scanning patients and normal controls and developing a methodology for data analysis. This summer I was particularly involved in refining and broadening our analysis methods, recruiting and scanning normal controls, and doing group analysis.