The role of secondary motor and language cortices in morbidity and mortality: a retrospective functional MRI study of surgical planning for patients with intracranial tumors.

Object: Functional MRI (fMRI) is commonly used by neurosurgeons preoperatively to identify brain regions associated with essential behaviors, such as language and motor abilities. In this study the authors investigated the relationship between patient morbidity and mortality and the distance from the tumor border area to functional activations in secondary motor and language cortices.

Methods: Patients with primary or metastatic brain tumors who underwent preoperative fMRI motor and language mapping were selected from a large database of patients with tumors.