ABSTRACT
The Sevilla Neuropsychological Test Battery (BNS)(1,2) is a quantitatively and qualitatively easy-to-use tool for evaluating executive functioning of patients with neurological disorders: traumatic brain injury, cerebrovascular disorders, tumors, and adult dementia. For neurologically intact children, it is an ideal battery for assessing frontal factors which influence learning at school, as well as evaluating learning disabilities in children with neurological injury, and is very useful for designing neurological programs and for the evaluation of the rehabilitation. This battery adapts some of the classic tasks of evaluation to the computer. Some of these tasks (cancellation, Stroop and Tower of Hanoi) were adapted to the computer in other test batteries after computers appeared. The BNS version has been specifically adapted for neuropsychological assessment by means of computer. The 2.0 version is now available, having improved the 1.0 version in handling, ease, applicability, and adaption to any computer with the Windows operating system. BNS was designed to collect heterogeneous information about patients and to perform a data analysis, presenting output data in a most useful way for clinicians and investigators, thus making the possibility of constructing conclusions on clinical and experimental data essentially easier. The BNS system (Figure 14.1) allows comparison of heterogeneous data, personal medical data, testing data and parameters of brain activity. Personal medical data that are possible to store in the BNS database are:
1 Personal data about patient (name, age, profession, education), with the possibility of seeing a history of changes of basic social characteristics such as education and profession. Also, it is possible to see changes in a patient’s appearance (in photographs), etc.
