Consistency mapping of a fMRI implementation of the Pyramids and Palm Trees Semantic association task for presurgical language mapping

Motivation: Debate continues around the validity and best practices for clinical fMRI, driven partly by limited comparability between tasks used during fMRI versus intra-operative language mapping. Goal(s): To determine the reliability of a fMRI implementation of the Pyramids and Palm Trees task. Approach: Observational study in healthy controls (scanned twice) and presurgical patients with a brain tumour (scanned once on different MRI scanners) using a consistency mapping approach applied to task activation maps. Results: The PPTT fMRI task was easy for participants to complete and produced activation maps that were consistent between individuals, over time and across separate scanners. Impact: The availability of comparable paradigms for use in pre-surgical fMRI as well as during intra-operative awake testing may help to improve evaluations of the clinical relevance of fMRI predictions in patients undergoing awake glioma surgery.