fMRI can help stroke patients improve speech

The discovery of the human language center in the left hemisphere part of the brain with the help of functional MRI (fMRI) has allowed Norwegian researchers to distinguish stroke patients with a language problem.

The findings, published on 2 February in the journal Brain, may lead to a better way to categorize stroke patients and individualize each person's treatment.

The study was led by Karsten Specht, PhD, from the University of Bergen, and scanned patients several times with fMRI before and during language training, allowing researchers to study how the networks of the brain were activated.

Specht said fMRI makes it possible to find the location and degree of damage and how the activation patterns in the neural networks are related.

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