Progress of clinical application of functional MRI in the localization of brain language area

Abstract For surgical operation in the functional area in the brain, it's commonly demanded to resect the lesion to the maximal extent on the basis of preserve the normal neural function, thus the precise localization of functional area is extremely important. As for the advantages of being widely available, easy to grasp and non-invasive, the functional MRI (fMRI) has come into wide use, while the application of language fMRI is still in the initial stage. It's important to choose appropriate fMRI task according to the individual condition of the subject, the commonly-adopted tasks include verb generation, picture naming, word recognition, word generation, etc. However, the effectiveness of using fMRI to localize language area is not totally satisfactory, adopting multiple task is an effective approach to improve the sensitivity of this technique. The application of resting state fMRI in the localization of language area and the further research of the role of fMRI in localizing the Chinese language area are the important future directions.