title: Impact of correction factors in human brain lesion-behavior inference.
abstract: Statistical voxel-based lesion-behavior mapping (VLBM) in neurological patients with brain lesions is frequently used to examine the relationship between structure and function of the healthy human brain. Only recently, two simulation studies noted reduced anatomical validity of this method, observing the results of VLBM to be systematically misplaced by about 16 mm. However, both simulation studies differed from VLBM analyses of real data in that they lacked the proper use of two correction factors: lesion size and "sufficient lesion affection." In simulation experiments on a sample of 274 real stroke patients, we found that the use of these two correction factors reduced misplacement markedly compared to uncorrected VLBM. Apparently, the misplacement is due to physiological effects of brain lesion anatomy. Voxel-wise topographies of collateral damage in the real data were generated and used to compute a metric for the inter-voxel relation of brain damage. "Anatomical bias" vectors that were solely calculated from these inter-voxel relations in the patients' real anatomical data, successfully predicted the VLBM misplacement. The latter has the potential to help in the development of new VLBM methods that provide even higher anatomical validity than currently available by the proper use of correction factors. Hum Brain Mapp 38:1692-1701, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
authors.affiliation: Division of Neuropsychology, Centre of Neurology, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sperber
authors.affiliation: Division of Neuropsychology, Centre of Neurology, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.|Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, South Carolina, Columbia.
authors.forename: Hans-Otto
authors.initials: HO
authors.lastname: Karnath
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000209:etiology / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D020521:Stroke / Q000150:complications
keywords: brain injury; human; mass univariate statistics; statistical lesion analysis; statistical parametric mapping; stroke; voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping