Rush Center for Brain Mapping

What is brain mapping?

Brain mapping combines imaging, direct recording of brain activity, electrical stimulation and behavioral testing to determine where critical functions live in the brain and how those functions can be preserved or safely worked around during surgery. It creates a rare, real-time window into cognition as it happens, in awake people, at extremely precise, high resolution.

Because no two brains are organized in the same way, brain mapping is individualized for each person. That variability is a clinical challenge and a scientific opportunity — every patient mapped contributes to our understanding of how the human brain works.

"Every surgery is a chance to learn something about how the brain works and use it to help our patients." 

- Arka Mallela, MD, MS

How the Rush Center for Brain Mapping works

Mallela and his team use brain mapping to better understand how patients’ brains work. It can also be used as part of treatment for patients with epilepsy and brain tumors, as well as other conditions.

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Brain mapping for epilepsy

For patients whose seizures do not respond to medication, brain mapping can help identify where seizures begin and how they affect normal brain function. This may include noninvasive mapping with anatomic and functional MRI, behavioral testing, and electroencephalography, or EEG. But in many cases, greater precision is needed. Stereoelectroencephalography, or SEEG, records from inside the brain to understand where seizures originate and how they can be treated. During SEEG, physicians can also stimulate the brain to look at which regions and networks support language, memory, movement and other functions.

Learn more about how brain mapping works with epilepsy surgery

Brain mapping for tumors

Tumors distort the brain’s normal organization and disrupt anatomical boundaries. The Rush Center for Brain Mapping uses behavioral testing and imaging before surgery and electrical stimulation during surgery to distinguish tumors from functioning tissue.

Safely removing as much of the tumor as possible is associated with better results for the patient. Precisely understanding where brain function lives allows for safer and more effective surgery and can help teams learn more about how the brain works.

Other pathologies and conditions

Brain mapping is also helping researchers get a better understanding of what networks in the brain affect psychiatric disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression.

Our research 

How the brain creates language

Language, including naming objects, putting together sentences or holding a conversation, requires several regions of the brain to carefully work together. Where and when that happens is yet to be fully understood. But by recording the brain during language use and combining it with functional MRI, diffusion imaging and behavioral testing, the center is working to study how the brain assembles meaning into speech. 

Reorganization and recovery from injury in the brain

Another line of research examines how brain networks are connected and how tumors, seizures, or surgery can disrupt these networks. Researchers use this information to better predict and prevent injury to brain function and support recovery. The center is actively investigating how prehabilitation before surgery and rehabilitation after surgery can also better support patient recovery.

Emotional processing and psychiatric networks

The center is studying how the brain processes emotions and how psychiatric conditions including depression, anxiety and OCD affect these processes. Better understanding of these diseases may lead to better treatments for these debilitating conditions.

Our team also includes epileptologists at the Rush Epilepsy Center, one of the largest, most comprehensive programs in the world specializing in the care of pediatric and adult patients with medically refractory epilepsy. The Rush Epilepsy Center is accredited as a Level 4 epilepsy center by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers, the highest level possible.