Lesion-Symptom Mapping in Brain Tumor and Stroke Patients
Description
Data accompanying the paper: The impact of etiology in lesion-symptom mapping – A direct comparison between tumor and stroke Authors: E.E. van Grinsven, A.R. Smits, E. van Kessel, M.A.H. Raemaekers, E.H.F. de Haan, I.M.C. Huenges Wajer, V.J. Ruijters, M.E.P. Philippens, J.J.C. Verhoeff, N.F. Ramsey, P.A.J.T. Robe, T.J. Snijders and M.J.E. van Zandvoort Background: The behavioral consequences of lesions from different etiologies may vary because of how they affect brain tissue and how they are distributed. Therefore, the main objective of the present study was to directly compare lesion-symptom maps for memory and language functions from two populations, a tumor versus a stroke population. Methods: Data from two different studies were combined. Both the brain tumor (N = 196) and stroke (N = 147) patient populations underwent neuropsychological testing and an MRI, pre-operatively for the tumor population and within three months after stroke. For this study, we selected two internationally widely used standardized cognitive tasks, the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and the Verbal Fluency Test. We used a state-of-the-art machine learning-based, multivariate voxel-wise approach to produce lesion-symptom maps for these cognitive tasks for both populations separately and combined. To substantiate the results from the multivariate lesion-symptom mapping, additional univariate lesion-symptom mapping was performed for each cognitive task for the tumor and stroke data separately Results: Our lesion-symptom mapping results for the separate patient populations largely followed the expected neuroanatomical pattern based on previous literature. Substantial differences in lesion distribution hindered direct comparison. Still, in brain areas with adequate coverage in both groups, considerable LSM differences between the two populations were present for both memory and fluency tasks. Conclusion: The differences in the lesion-symptom maps between the stroke and tumor population could partly be explained by differences in lesion volume and topography. Despite these methodological limitations, our results confirmed that etiology matters when investigating the cognitive consequences of lesions with lesion-symptom mapping. Therefore, caution is advised with generalizing lesion-symptom results across etiologies. Folders: (1) Lesion overlap maps: contains the etiology-specific lesion overlap maps. (2) Multivariate lesion-symptom maps: contains the thresholded p-value maps for the multivariate analysis for each cognitive task and for each etiology, seperately. (3) Power maps for Univariate analyses: contains all power maps for each univariate lesion-symptom mapping analysis. (4) Univariate lesion-symptom maps: contains the thresholded Z-score maps for the univariate analysis for each cognitive task and for each etiology, seperately. All data is registered to the 2mm MNI standard brain. LVC = lesion volume correction