I'm not on the outside of medicine. Significant practice variation exists, but complex neurosurgical conditions are usually managed at academic centers and fMRI is used for planning in neurooncology [1] and epilepsy surgery [2].
Fair enough, I didn't mean to suggest you were I was speaking more generally but worded that poorly.
My comments come from systems supporting thousands of clinical neurooncological procedures (i.e. tumor resections) in planning and execution with very little interest or utilization of fMRI beyond a handful proponents and their sites. Quite literally barely on the radar of most of the neurosurgeons apart from occasional papers, and some of them are quite negative about it also.
I could have an inaccurate picture of the breadth of clinical practice, and it's certainly a couple years out of date, but I would be very surprised to find a huge upsurge of usage outside research had happened.
It is certainly the case that the articles claim of "transformation" hasn't happened in that space.
If the article had instead claimed that some of the trickiest cases tend to have fMRI done (true, surgeons will take all they help they can get trying cases that otherwise might be inoperable) or that they are a feature of high profile academic sites (also mostly true) I wouldn't have objected.
I respect your experience, and I'll concede that fMRI for pre-surgical planning in neurooncology is used at only some centers. If you worked mainly in neurooncology you may have missed some of the uses of fMRI for epilepsy surgery. Thanks for the discussion.
Fair enough, I didn't mean to suggest you were I was speaking more generally but worded that poorly.
My comments come from systems supporting thousands of clinical neurooncological procedures (i.e. tumor resections) in planning and execution with very little interest or utilization of fMRI beyond a handful proponents and their sites. Quite literally barely on the radar of most of the neurosurgeons apart from occasional papers, and some of them are quite negative about it also.
I could have an inaccurate picture of the breadth of clinical practice, and it's certainly a couple years out of date, but I would be very surprised to find a huge upsurge of usage outside research had happened.
It is certainly the case that the articles claim of "transformation" hasn't happened in that space.
If the article had instead claimed that some of the trickiest cases tend to have fMRI done (true, surgeons will take all they help they can get trying cases that otherwise might be inoperable) or that they are a feature of high profile academic sites (also mostly true) I wouldn't have objected.