Brain mapping helps our specialists diagnose chronic conditions like Parkinson’s disease, and plan surgeries for acute conditions like brain tumors.

With advanced brain mapping technology, our team of experts can see the precise location of your individual brain functions – speech, memory and movement – in order to determine the most appropriate treatment for you.

If surgery is needed, brain mapping technology can be used before and during your procedure to differentiate healthy brain matter from diseased tissue. It can also be used to define a surgical or navigational strategy to help avoid injury to portions of the brain needed for critical functions.

Types of brain mapping

Diffusion tensor imaging with white matter tractography is one type of brain mapping. It uses state-of-the-art technology to create a 3-D map of your brain. We use this map to locate nerve fibers that control speech, memory, cognition, thought – all of the things that make you, you!

This type of brain mapping helps us:

• Determine the best surgical approach to remove a tumor
• Diagnose and treat traumatic brain injuries
• Find breaks in brain fibers that may cause the loss of certain body and memory functions
• Understand which brain connections are intact and which are damaged

While diffusion tensor imaging helps us plan a surgery beforehand, other types of brain mapping technology help us during surgery. These technologies work like a GPS system, giving our neurosurgeons real-time guidance deep within the brain.

Conditions we treat

Brain mapping is a minimally invasive technology used to diagnose and treat:

• Brain tumors
• Parkinson’s disease
• Subcortical tumors and cysts that would otherwise be inaccessible to surgeons, and that were once considered inoperable