Lecture given by Swathi Kiran, PhD., CCC-SLP (Boston University) in the C-STAR lecture series, on April 5th, 2018.

Due to flight delays, Dr. Kiran was unable to appear live at the University of South Carolina, so she gave her lecture from Philadelphia International Airport, to an appreciative online audience!

Aphasia Research Lab, Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/aphasiaresearch/people/swathi-kiran/

Abstract:
The nature of language recovery in aphasia remains unresolved despite several advances in our conceptual thinking, the methodology, and data analysis approaches. There is still a debate about whether successful language recovery is associated with the engagement of residual regions in the damaged left hemisphere, the undamaged right hemisphere or a combination of the two. In this talk, I will propose that language recovery is more nuanced than these broad categories and depends on bilateral (left and right) hemisphere language regions as well as domain general regions. To this end, I will present results from our lab that have examined the engagement of a network of regions during language processing as well as after rehabilitation. These approaches include examining structural connectivity, functional connectivity and effective connectivity of regions in both hemisphere that provide more clues to the dynamic and complex nature of language recovery. In the second part of this talk, I extend these results with other ongoing work to predict treatment outcomes after rehabilitation in aphasia. These methods include computational simulation and machine learning approaches to identify optimal parameters that promote treatment outcomes.