Let's start this course off together by getting to know our main educator, the clinical educators at the hospital and the topic in the center of this course - the brain!

Before we dig deeper into language mapping, let's get acquainted with the most crucial anatomical terms you will need throughout the course in the following steps.

Now that you have warmed up with the anatomy of the brain, we will find out which areas are assumed to be responsible for language and what consequences a damage to those areas has.

It is now time to check how much you recall from this week's steps and look ahead to Week 2.

Let's have a look at what this week on the preoperative preparations will teach us and meet the neurosurgeon guiding you through it.

After a patient is admitted to the hospital, we will see now which steps he goes through next and which classifications for tumour diagnoses there are.

Apart from the type of tumour, let us discuss which other criteria a patient has to meet to qualify for an awake brain surgery and if our patient meets them.

Even if it is based on all the medical assessments and obtained results, the decision to operate or not is not always as straight forward as one might think. Let's explore the difficulty and solutions of this.

It is time to test what you have learned about preoperative assessment in Week 2 and look ahead to Week 3.

Before we discuss the intraoperative procedure in detail, let us look at the last preparations and checklists for the patient and the surgical team.

In the first phase, the patient is held asleep under anesthesia to position him for the awake phase. Here the anesthesiologist will talk us through these steps.

In the following step, we get to watch the intraoperative mapping and the processes of deciding whether or not to resect, explained by the neurosurgeon.

Now that the mapping is over, the patient needs to be closed up and woken up safely. The anesthesiologist and neurophysiologist talk you through these procedures and their complications.

It's time to test what you have learned in the intraoperative Week 3 and to think beyond the tasks described so far.

After being introduced to the medical side of an awake brain surgery, let us get involved with clinical linguistics now.

Let us build on what we have already learned about language areas in the brain by adding the knowledge how different areas are involved in different subtasks of language.

In our every day conversations, we do not perform language tasks, but use spontaneous speech. Why would we not just use that for language mapping?

Now that you know why using spontaneous speech as measure of language skills is not enough, let us get behind the necessary steps of developing a useful language test.

Now it is time for you to put words into action. Start developing your own little test for LTABS with the following instructions.

Find out about the variety of language tests to choose from in the following step.

Applying every possible test on a single patient would not be reasonable. Let us find out how a selection of tests is made per patient.

If we want to evaluate whether it was a successful surgery, we assess the post-operative state of the patient. Here we have a look at how the patient is doing shortly after and what conclusion to draw from this.

Let's go back to the small test you developed last week. This week, we will take it one step further by piloting it.

Last week, you tried out your test as a pilot to investigate its validity and had your peers evaluate the results with you. We will look at this last stage of test development once more.

We will get to know now how mapping can be done with a preoperative procedure, called nTMS, and how we can profit from it.

You have been introduced to the language mapping procedures at the University Medical Centre Groningen. However, it is good to widen one's horizon to learning about how other centres approach the procedure.

Let us check one last time how much we remember from this Week's steps, before we leave you with some additional information concerning LTABS courses and warm fare-well.