Explaining Language Outcome and Recovery After Stroke (ELORAS)

I want to find out whether, when and how speech and language abilities can be recovered after stroke. Two decades of experience with functional and structural neuroimaging of language processing in the human brain has shown that, although there is a great deal of consistency in the brain areas that different people use when performing specific tasks, there is also variance that indicates that the same task can be supported by different anatomical brain systems. Understanding this variance is essential for improving our predictions for outcome after stroke because the effect of damage to one system will depend on whether all, some or none of the other systems have also been damaged.

Our research will use functional neuroimaging of both healthy controls and people who have had a stroke to identify different neural systems for specific language tasks. We will identify behavioural, demographic and neuroimaging markers that distinguish which patients do and do not recover.

We will use this information to improve our predictions for language outcome and provide new ways to test a patient’s response to different types of treatment.