Memory assessment in the clinical context using functional magnetic resonance imaging: a critical look at the state of the field.

The use of functional magnetic resonance imaging to map language and sensorimotor regions in the brain is rapidly becoming a clinical standard in neurosurgical centers. Despite a wealth of cognitive neuroscience data showing focal medial temporal activation elicited by memory encoding and retrieval tasks in controls, translating such findings to generate reliable metrics for clinical use has been slow. The current review documents some of the successes that have been achieved, using both activation and resting-state functional connectivity in the clinical context of temporal lobe epilepsy, and discusses some of the challenges that remain to be addressed.