Clinical use of functional magnetic resonance imaging: Reflections on the new CPT codes

The recent advent of clinical fMRI provides a unique opportunity to improve patient care using a completely noninvasive, reliable, and sensitive functional imaging procedure. At the same time, there are challenges to ensure that practitioners are qualified to conduct clinical fMRI studies within currently approved areas of clinical practice (presurgical mapping). Most fMRI experts, however, anticipate that fMRI will eventually be demonstrated to have valid applications in other clinical areas (e.g., see this issue for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and as a biomarker for response to various medical, surgical and behavioral interventions). How clinical neuropsychologists will keep pace with these emerging scientific and clinical developments will present a challenge for the field in the coming years. It is critical that neuropsychology and other related fields provide adequate training opportunities so that the quality of service delivery is commensurate with the complexity of this important technological advance. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007.