Reliability of single subject fMRI in the context of presurgical planning

Test-retest reliability of fMRI paradigms has been assessed in many studies [1], however only few have looked at the problem from the context of presurgical planning [2]. fMRI has been used to map the cortex of patients with intracranial tumour in order to improve surgical planning and safety (minimizing chances of neurological deficits). Most neurosurgeons use threshold maps to identify regions of activation. Therefore we have focused our study on reproducibility of a thresholded single subject t map acquired twice three days apart in normal volunteers undergoing paradigms designed to identify eloquent cortical regions around tumours.