REVIEW  NEW INSIGHTS IN STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL ANATOMY OF THE HUMAN ASSOCIATIVE PATHWAYS FOR OPERATIVE NEUROSURGERY 

Journal of Neurosurgical Sciences 2021 December;65(6):590-604

DOI: 10.23736/S0390-5616.21.05391-1

Copyright © 2021 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

lingua: Inglese

The inferior longitudinal fasciculus: anatomy, function and surgical considerations

Ilyess ZEMMOURA ^{1, 2} ✉, Eléonor BURKHARDT ³, Guillaume HERBET ^{4, 5}

¹ Inserm, UMR 1253, Imaging and Brain (iBrain), Université de Tours, Tours, France; ² Department of Neurosurgery, CHRU de Tours, Tours, France; ³ Praxiling Lab, National Center of Scientific Research Unit 5267, Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 University, Montpellier, France; ⁴ Institute of Functional Genomics, University of Montpellier, CNRS UMR5203, INSERM U1191, Montpellier, France; ⁵ Department of Neurosurgery, Montpellier University Medical Center, Gui de Chauliac Hospital, Montpellier, France

The inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) is a large association white matter tract that interconnects, in a bidirectional manner, the occipital cortex to anterior temporal structures. In view of both its pattern of cortical projections and its recently evidenced multilayered anatomical organization, the ILF has been supposed to be vital for maintaining a wide range of cognitive and affective processes operating on the visual modality. As tumors commonly damage the temporal cortex, an updated knowledge of the functional anatomy of this ventral tract is needed to better map and monitor on-line its potential functions and thus to improve surgical outcomes. In this review, we first describe the gross anatomy of the ILF, its array of cortical terminations and its different layers. We then provide a comprehensive review of the functions that have been assigned to the tract. We successively address its role in object and face recognition, visual emotion recognition, language and semantic, including reading, and memory. It is especially shown that the ILF is critically involved in visually-guided behaviors, as its breakdown, both in sudden neurosurgical and progressive neurodegenerative diseases, is commonly associated with visual-specific neuropsychological syndromes (e.g. prosopagnosia and pure alexia, and so on). In the last section, we discuss the extent to which the ILF can reorganize in response to glioma infiltration and to surgery, and provide some reflections on how its intraoperative mapping may be refined.

KEY WORDS: Primary visual agnosia; Semantics; Reading; Prosopagnosia; Glioma; Neuronal plasticity