Catalan researchers have described for the first time how to operate on a brain tumor while preserving the patient’s ability to play chess. The research and operation comes from the Cognition and Brain Plasticity group at the University of Barcelona and the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), Bellvitge University Hospital and the Computer Vision Center. The results were published in the journal Cortex.
The patient is an amateur chess player who underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor in the left parietal lobe. The previous study made it possible to carry out the passage to the operating room while minimizing the risk of the operation on its performance in chess, reports the Agència Catalana de Notícies (ACN).
Before surgery, the researchers combined electrical stimulation mapping on the awake patient with functional MRI to assess different cognitive processes involved in playing chess, such as visual search (locating a piece on the chessboard ), rules recovery (determining whether a move is legal or not) and the ability to predict checkmate.
Following previous work, they identified a point in the left supramarginal gyrus of the brain that is essential for maintaining the ability to play chess well. Before the intervention, the patient (who had an ELO score of 1.950) had expressed his desire to preserve his performance as a chess player.
Thanks to the work of detecting the brain region related to chess and the efforts to not affect this region during the operation, the patient was able to maintain both his chess performance and his ELO score after the intervention.
The study demonstrated the feasibility of this type of protocol to preserve higher cognitive abilities after resection of a brain tumor. In addition to the usefulness it had in this specific case, the study opens the door to the use of similar protocols to promote the preservation of complex skills in future patients.
With more than 300,000 brain tumors diagnosed each year worldwide, brain cancer represents a major global health problem. The usual treatment is removal of the tumor by neurosurgery.
This intervention is often carried out in the awake patient when the lesion is located in the so-called eloquent areas of the brain, which are those linked to functions such as speech, movement of the extremities or facial expressions, functions that are particularly sensitive to preservation. during surgery.
To maximize this preservation, specialists perform the procedure called electrical stimulation mapping (ESM). This procedure involves stimulating the brain with an electrode while the patient performs a certain task to identify functional regions essential for movement, senses or language.
In the case of the chess-playing patient, the mapping of the electrical stimulation was supplemented by a brain study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While fMRI showed brain activity near the tumor, ESM revealed the existence of the functional point during the effort to retrieve the chess rules.
