Application of Multimodal Imaging Techniques to Examine Language Recovery in Post

描述（由申请人提供）：2010年健康人群方案的目标之一是减少不同人群之间的健康差距。慢性失语症患者语言缺陷的诊断和治疗虽然具有重要的理论和临床意义，但仍存在着很大的差异。然而，目前关于这一主题的研究缺乏具体的建议，即哪些语言疗法有可能促进中风患者最大程度的语言恢复，更重要的是，这种可塑性变化背后的神经机制。这项拨款提案扩展了PI之前在单语失语症康复方面的工作，利用先进的功能神经成像技术来更好地理解接受理论动机语言治疗的患者的语言恢复机制。这项K18指导资助提案的目的是让候选人学习(a)详细的结构病变分析技术，(b)针对中风人群的最先进的fMRI数据分析技术，以及(c) MEG/EEG实验和分析方法，以检查康复后有效的连接变化。这些技术将在一个小规模项目中实施，该项目涉及10名失语症患者，他们将参加一个为期10周的结构化命名治疗项目，并将接受治疗前和治疗后的结构T1、功能性MRI和MEG/EEG实验。在本项目结束时，候选人将成功地利用一套完整的工具，最终允许对慢性中风幸存者的语言恢复的心理语言学，结构和功能基础进行详细的，解剖学基础的表征。这项工作在临床上也很重要，因为它有可能定义未来慢性卒中管理的卫生保健实践。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One goal of the Healthy People 2010 program is to reduce health disparities across different segments of the population. Diagnosis and treatment of language deficits in patients with chronic aphasia is one area where disparities continue to exist even though this topic is of great theoretical and clinical significance. The current research on this topic, however, lacks specific recommendations on what language therapies have the potential to facilitate maximal language recovery in individuals with stroke and more importantly, the neural mechanisms that underlie such plasticity changes. This grant proposal extends the PI's previous work in monolingual aphasia rehabilitation to utilizing advanced functional neuroimaging techniques to better understand the mechanisms involved in language recovery in patients who receive theoretically motivated language therapy. The aim of this K18 mentored grant proposal is for the candidate to learn (a) detailed structural lesion analysis techniques, (b) state of the art fMRI data analysis techniques specific to stroke populations, and (c) MEG/EEG experimentation and analysis methods to examine effective connectivity changes subsequent to rehabilitation. These techniques will be implemented in a small scale project involving ten patients with aphasia who will participate in a ten week structured naming therapy program and will undergo pre and post therapy structural T1, functional MRI, and MEG/EEG experiments. At the end of this project, the candidate will be successful at utilizing an integrated set of tools that will ultimately allow a detailed, anatomically grounded characterization of the psycholinguistic, structural and functional basis of language recovery in chronic stroke survivors. The proposed work is also clinically important because it has the potential to define future health care practice in chronic stroke management. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This training plan will integrate three complementary advanced neuroimaging techniques to examine the effect of language therapy on language recovery in individuals with post stroke aphasia who have naming deficits. The proposed work is important because it has the potential to define future health care practice in chronic stroke management. Better therapies will be developed if we understand how the brain is capable of recovering subsequent to a stroke and conversely, we will be able to characterize brain plasticity mechanism more reliably if we are confident about the effectiveness of therapies that can improve language recovery in individuals with chronic aphasia.