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Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy-Based Adaptive Language Mapping in People with Post-Stroke Aphasia and Neurologically Healthy Controls
Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Erin Meier1 (e.meier@northeastern.edu), Veronica Fletcher1, Esprit Ange Andraos1, Caela Hung1, Priyansh Khare1, Isabelle Cotenoff1, Leanna Ugent1, Gengchen Wei1, David Lin2, Meryem Yücel3; 1Northeastern University, 2Harvard Medical School, 3Boston University
Most neuroimaging studies in people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) have not sufficiently controlled for task difficulty, which has contributed to mixed findings about the roles of left versus right hemisphere regions and the multiple demand (MD) network in recovery. In this study, we used a functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based Adaptive Language Mapping (ALM) Semantic Matching task (Wilson et al., 2018) to determine the extent to which 15 PWA and 15 controls recruit language versus MD regions when task difficulty is controlled at the subject level. The ALM fNIRS task included alternating blocks of experimental (semantic matching) and control (letter strings matching) trials. Data were acquired with daisy-chained 8x8 NIRx NIRSport2 devices and were preprocessed in Homer3 (Huppert et al., 2009). A trend towards between-group differences in semantic match accuracy (FDR-p= 0.059) was driven by two PWA with severe aphasia. Controls activated left inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis (LIFGop) and triangularis (LIFGtri), left mid to posterior superior temporal (LSTG) and middle temporal (LMTG) gyri, and right IFG. PWA activated mid LSTG and LMTG with variable patterns from patient to patient. PWA had significantly lower activity than controls in LIFGop, LIFGtri, LSTG, and left inferior temporal gyrus (p < 0.05). Neither group significantly activated right hemisphere or MD regions. The motivation for this study was to address a central methodological limitation of previous functional imaging studies in PWA (i.e., task difficulty confounds) using a promising imaging modality, fNIRS. The next steps include investigation of relationships between single-subject fNIRS and language task data.
Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic