Author response: Practice guideline summary: Use of fMRI in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy: Report of the Guideline Development, Dissemination, and Implementation Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology

We thank Papanicolaou et al. for the comment on our article,1 and agree that important issues were raised regarding thresholding methods in functional MRI (fMRI).2 However, the original estimate of the number of studies potentially affected was substantially lowered.3,4 Imprecision is part of every diagnostic test; its presence in thresholded fMRI activation maps is unlikely to lead to spurious lateralized correlations between cognitive tasks and blood oxygenation level–dependent signal, or to agreement between fMRI and other investigations. As Papanicolaou et al. note, laterality measures are likely robust to the occurrence of false-positive clusters, since they are derived from side-to-side ratios.

Source: Neurology - August 7, 2017 Category: Neurology Authors: Gloss, D., Szaflarski, J. P., Holland, S. K., Binder, J. R., Theodore, W. H. Tags: WRITECLICK & amp;reg; EDITOR ' S CHOICE Source Type: research