Broca's area is not activated in a reproducible way by overt naming: a study with fMRI

Background and Purpose: Intraoperative mapping (IOM) in the awake patient is, for some clinical groups, considered to be the gold-standard for the identification of essential language sites; the most widely used task is confrontation naming. On the other hand, functional imaging is rapidly evolving and claims to complement or even substitute IOM. However, little is known on the test-retest reliability of imaging data in the language domain; for naming controversial data exist even for core language areas such as Broca's area. The aim of our study was to assess the reliability of activations in repeated measureme…