Application of Multimodal Imaging Techniques to Examine Language Recovery in Post

描述（由申请人提供）：2010年健康人计划的一个目标是减少不同人群的健康差距。尽管慢性失语症患者语言障碍的诊断和治疗具有重要的理论和临床意义，但仍是一个存在分歧的领域。然而，目前关于这一主题的研究缺乏具体的建议，即什么样的语言疗法有可能促进中风患者的最大语言恢复，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以前在单语失语症康复方面的工作，利用先进的功能性神经成像技术更好地了解接受理论动机语言治疗的患者语言恢复的机制。该K18指导拨款提案的目的是让候选人学习（a）详细的结构性病变分析技术，（B）针对中风人群的最新功能磁共振成像数据分析技术，以及（c）MEG/EEG实验和分析方法，以检查康复后的有效连接变化。这些技术将在一个小规模的项目中实施，涉及10名失语症患者，他们将参加为期10周的结构化命名治疗计划，并将接受治疗前后的结构T1，功能性MRI和MEG/EEG实验。 在这个项目结束时，候选人将成功地利用一套集成的工具，最终允许详细的，解剖学为基础的描述慢性中风幸存者语言恢复的心理语言学，结构和功能基础。拟议的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医疗保健实践。

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.