Magnetic resonance approaches to the identification of focal pathophysiology in children with brain disease

New magnetic resonance techniques now provide increasingly powerful ways of identifying the structural correlates of impaired cerebral function. The aims of this article are to show how we have been using a variety of magnetic resonance techniques to identify focal pathophysiology in children with brain disease, and to describe how these findings have contributed to our understanding of impaired function in these children. An outline is given of the methods that we have chosen to use, and this is followed by their applications in a number of groups of patients. The examples that are given illustrate the importance of detecting brain abnormalities that might previously have gone undetected.