Localization of Broca's area using verb generation tasks in the MEG: Validation against fMRI

Functional MRI (fMRI) is routinely used to non-invasively localize language areas. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is being explored as an alternative technique. MEG tasks to localize receptive language are well established although there are no standardized tasks to localize expressive language areas. We developed two expressive language tasks for MEG and validated their localizations against fMRI data. Ten right-handed adolescents (μ = 17.5 years) were tested with fMRI and MEG on two tasks: verb generation to pictures and verb generation to words. MEG and fMRI data were normalized and overlaid. The number of overlapping voxels activated in fMRI and MEG were counted for each subject, for each task, at different thresholding levels. For picture verb generation, there was 100% concordance between MEG and fMRI lateralization, and for word verb generation, there was 75% concordance. A count showed 79.6% overlap of voxels activated by both MEG and fMRI for picture verb generation and 50.2% overlap for word verb generation. The percentage overlap decreased with increasingly stringent activation thresholds. Our novel MEG expressive language tasks successfully identified neural regions involved in language production and showed high concordance with fMRI laterality. Percentage overlap of activated voxels was also high when validated against fMRI, but showed task-specific and threshold-related effects. The high concordance and high percentage overlap between fMRI and MEG activations confirm the validity of our new MEG task. Furthermore, the higher concordance from the picture verb generation task suggests that this is a promising task for use in the young clinical population.