New research that uses brain imaging to examine connections between different parts of the brain shows that communication between the left and right hemispheres is often disrupted from a stroke; the greater the disruption, the more profound the patient’s impairment in movement or vision.

This is a first step in a multiyear project assessing how to predict how well people will recover from stroke and better target stroke treatments by capitalizing on the inherent neural plasticity that is present even in the adult brain.