A Follow-up fMRI Study of the Phoneme Processing in Hoarseness Patients with Laser Cordectomy

Objective To evaluate the activation of language cortex by follow-up reading task fMRI at pre and post laser cordectomy,and to study the influence of hoarseness and voice rebuilding state on the language cortex of laryngocarcinoma patients.Methods 16 patients with laryngocarcinoma of early stage(Tis,T1N0M0) underwent MRI examination three times respectively.The first examination was performed before laser cordectomy when the patients had no hoarseness,the other two examinations were performed at 1 week after surgery,at that time the patients had obvious hoarseness,and at 2-3 month after surgery when the voice rebuilding had been finished.Event related visually presented stimuli were employed.The task was to read visually presented neutral Chinese bi words with high frequency loudly.Activated voxels were obtained by AFNI software package.ANOVA was used to evaluate whether significant difference exist between examinations.Results Significantly more activated voxels in left inferior frontal gyrus were detected at husky-voice stage than the other two(F=7.916,7.270,P0.01 respectively).Also significantly more activated voxels were detected in bilateral precentral gyrus(F=11.66510.214,7.665,6.482,P0.01 respectively),middle frontal gyrus(F=10.337,10.563,6.458,6.303,P0.01 respectively) and supplementary motor area(F=14.343,14.095,7.945,7.947,P0.01 respectively) at voice-recovery course.Conclusion During the voice rebuilding course,the voice function network remodeling was happened at left inferior frontal gyrus,bilateral middle frontal gyrus,bilateral precentral gyrus and bilateral supplementary motor area,which had different role in the phoneme processing.