Frontiers in Neurology – Applied Neuroimaging

Research Topic

Brain Hemispheric Specialization and its pathological change revealed by Neuroimaging and Neuropsychology

Brain hemispheric specialization has a fundamental role in the functional cortical organization in humans and the morphological, functional, metabolic and connectivity asymmetries of brain regions were traditionally correlated to the optimal information processing, language function, visuospatial task, attention, and many aspects of emotion. 

The laterality of human brain varies with the aging and the variations from the normal pattern of asymmetry could be often suggestive of pathology. Indeed, it has been suggested that abnormal asymmetry may serve as a neuroanatomical marker or as a risk factor. In other words, the existence of asymmetry in brain regions where the symmetry is expected or, on the contrary, the absence of asymmetry where asymmetry is expected could be often indicative of neurological or neurodegenerative disorder.

Our aim is to investigate whether and how the brain asymmetries change, and the abnormalities could cause behavioral, cognitive, and symptomatic alterations in neurological diseases, explored through the new advanced technology in the field.
The present Research Topic is to collect scientific works on the brain lateralization investigated with Neuroimaging approaches and Neuropsychological assessments in neurological disease. The following contributions are welcome:

• New research on biomarkers of brain lateralization;
• Novel neuroimaging methods to characterize the brain asymmetry;
• Novel neuropsychological assessments and techniques to better identify the brain specialization; 
• Correlation study between neuroimaging findings and neuropsychological evaluations;
• Works exploring clinical conditions of asymmetry through multi-modal imaging approaches such as MRI, fMRI, DTI, PET or MEG; 
• Neuroimaging and Neuropsychological asymmetrical data investigations through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; 
• Sex- and age-linked differences in brain asymmetry and neuropsychology patterns;
• Longitudinal studies on the brain asymmetry progression in normal aging or diseases;
• Identification of new metrics or indices for calculating the brain asymmetry;
• Review articles that summarize the current literature on the brain hemispheres specialization.