Functional Neuroimaging: Current Status

Despite increasing complexity of neurosurgical procedures; they have become safer over the last few decades which can be clearly attributed to rapid advancement in technology coupled with dramatic improvement in radiological imaging. Today neurosurgical treatment is increasingly benefitted by rapid developments in radiological imaging and post processing techniques leading to decreased invasiveness and improved safety. With increasing expectation from patients and greater understanding of biology of intracranial pathologies, the limitations of structural imaging became more obvious leading to development of imaging modalities to link function with imaging providing robust clinical information with potential to impact the clinical management and outcome. Initially driven by improvement in structural imaging, the last few years have witnessed tremendous advances in the field of functional neuroimaging and brain mapping techniques [1]. In the last two decades a variety of functional imaging techniques have been developed which are increasingly able to give surgeons an understanding not only of the complex anatomical relationships of brain lesions, but also of the functional relationship of the lesion to surrounding key cortical areas and white matter structures.