Rey–Osterrieth complex figure test: Comparison of traditional and qualitative scoring systems after unilateral temporal lobectomy

Abstract

Objective

We compared the performance on the Rey–Osterrieth Complex Figure Test (ROCF) of patients that had undergone unilateral anterior temporal lobectomy under both Taylor’s and Loring’s scoring systems to identify the sensitivity and specificity of each item for differentiating visuospatial memory deficits.

Method

We administered the ROCF to evaluate the visual memory of 37 left anterior temporal lobectomy (LATL) and 38 right anterior temporal lobectomy (RATL) patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy who had undergone a standard unilateral anterior temporal lobectomy between 1996 and 2010. Fisher’s exact and Qui–Quadrado tests were used to analyze the relationships between the qualitative variables. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to compare the quantitative variables from the right and left sides.

Results

RATL patients performed worse than LATL patients based on the total score for delayed recall (DR) (p = 0.012). The scoring system’s showed a specificity of 97.2% & 78.9% and sensitivity of 10.5% & 62.2% on DR, for the Taylor and Loring systems respectively. Our detailed analysis of certain items showed that some differed between the groups in terms of the presence/absence, correct reproduction, and errors of those items. Loring’ errors I, IV, and X on DR and errors IV and X on immediate recall were more frequent in the RATL group.

Conclusions

The use of these two scoring systems combined may help maximize sensitivity and specificity with clinical populations. Further, our analyses showed that items could be clustered better and different weights could be given to them to maximize sensitivity and specificity.

Keywords:

• Epilepsy
• visuospatial memory
• neuropsychology
• ROCF
• temporal lobectomy

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants and their families as well as the staff at Hospital de Clínicas, Federal University of Paraná, Brazil.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.