Brain Stimul
September 2025
Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has emerged as an effective therapy for Meige syndrome (MS). However, the optimal stimulation site within STN and the most effective stimulation fiber tracts have not been investigated.
Methods: Based on the discovery cohort (n = 65), we first identified the optimal stimulation site within the STN using the sweet spot mapping method.
Epilepsia
September 2025
Objective: This study aims to determine whether the anatomically heterogeneous lesions that cause hyperkinetic seizures (HKS) are connected to a common functional network.
Methods: We identified patients from the Beijing Tiantan-Fengtai Epilepsy Center with HKs as the primary ictal semiology. These included patients had focal seizure-onset zone, here referred to as a "lesion.
Comparatively high excitability of myelinated fibres suggests that they represent a major mediator of deep brain stimulation effects. Such effects can be modelled using different levels of abstraction, ranging from simple electric field estimates to complex multicompartment axon models. In this study, we explored three metrics to evaluate axonal activation: electric field magnitudes, electric field projections and pathway activation modelling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGene expression shapes the brain's functional connectome, yet it is unclear whether genes linked to the same disorder converge on shared networks. We introduce gene network mapping-a framework combining spatial transcriptomics with normative functional connectivity to identify networks associated with gene expression. By generating -network maps, we captured distributed connectivity patterns for individual genes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an effective treatment for medically refractory cranial-cervical dystonia (CCD or Meige syndrome). However, clinical responses vary substantially across individuals, likely due to differences in electrode placement and modulation of target neural circuits.
Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 51 patients with CCD treated with STN-DBS at a single center.
Tremor occurs in various forms across diverse neurological disorders, including Parkinson's disease and essential tremor. While clinically heterogeneous, converging evidence suggests a shared brain network may underlie tremor across conditions. Here, we empirically define such a network using four modalities: lesion locations, atrophy patterns, EMG-fMRI, and deep brain stimulation outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDeep brain stimulation is a brain circuit intervention that can modulate distinct neural pathways for the alleviation of neurological symptoms in patients with brain disorders. In Parkinson's disease, subthalamic deep brain stimulation clinically mimics the effect of dopaminergic drug treatment, but the shared pathway mechanisms on cortex - basal ganglia networks are unknown. To address this critical knowledge gap, we combined fully invasive neural multisite recordings in patients undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery with normative MRI-based whole-brain connectomics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElucidating the diversity patterns and assembly mechanisms of microbial communities is crucial for comprehending ecological processes and assessing biogeochemical cycles in the hyporheic zones of cold regions. The spatial and temporal diversity patterns and mechanisms governing these microbial communities are not yet well understood. Our study revealed that microbial richness decreased rapidly during the initial freezing period.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry
March 2025
In the field of deep brain stimulation (DBS), 2 major themes are currently making significant progress. The first of these is the framework of connectomic DBS, in which circuits that are associated with improvements of specific symptoms are described and targeted to improve and potentially personalize treatment. The second theme is related to the concept of brain sensing and adaptive DBS, which are aimed at identifying neural biomarkers that may guide stimulation in a closed-loop fashion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2025
Deep brain stimulation is an efficacious treatment for dystonia. While the internal pallidum serves as the primary target, recently, stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has been investigated. However, optimal targeting within this structure and its surroundings have not been studied in depth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroimaging involves the acquisition of extensive 3D images and 4D time series data to gain insights into brain structure and function. The analysis of such data necessitates both spatial and temporal processing. In this context, "fslmaths" has established itself as a foundational software tool within our field, facilitating domain-specific image processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Patients with coexisting spastic cerebral palsy (CP) and dystonia have limited treatment options. In this study, the authors aimed to evaluate the efficacy of deep brain stimulation (DBS) targeting the superior cerebellar peduncles (SCPs) in adults with CP.
Methods: Five patients with CP and medically refractory dystonia and spasticity underwent SCP DBS.
Diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) is a widely used neuroimaging modality that permits the in vivo exploration of white matter connections in the human brain. Normative structural connectomics - the application of large-scale, group-derived dMRI datasets to out-of-sample cohorts - have increasingly been leveraged to study the network correlates of focal brain interventions, insults, and other regions-of-interest (ROIs). Here, we provide a normative, whole-brain connectome in MNI space that enables researchers to interrogate fiber streamlines that are likely perturbed by given ROIs, even in the absence of subject-specific dMRI data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFrontal circuits play a critical role in motor, cognitive and affective processing, and their dysfunction may result in a variety of brain disorders. However, exactly which frontal domains mediate which (dys)functions remains largely elusive. We studied 534 deep brain stimulation electrodes implanted to treat four different brain disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDeep-brain stimulation (DBS) is a potential novel treatment for memory dysfunction. Current attempts to enhance memory focus on stimulating human hippocampus or entorhinal cortex. However, an alternative strategy is to stimulate brain areas providing modulatory inputs to medial temporal memory-related structures, such as the nucleus accumbens (NAc), which is implicated in enhancing episodic memory encoding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain computer interfaces (BCI) provide unprecedented spatiotemporal precision that will enable significant expansion in how numerous brain disorders are treated. Decoding dynamic patient states from brain signals with machine learning is required to leverage this precision, but a standardized framework for identifying and advancing novel clinical BCI approaches does not exist. Here, we developed a platform that integrates brain signal decoding with connectomics and demonstrate its utility across 123 hours of invasively recorded brain data from 73 neurosurgical patients treated for movement disorders, depression and epilepsy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Total Environ
November 2023
Neuroimage Clin
September 2023
Introduction: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an established treatment in patients of various ages with pharmaco-resistant neurological disorders. Surgical targeting and postoperative programming of DBS depend on the spatial location of the stimulating electrodes in relation to the surrounding anatomical structures, and on electrode connectivity to a specific distribution pattern within brain networks. Such information is usually collected using group-level analysis, which relies on the availability of normative imaging resources (atlases and connectomes).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: This study was undertaken to describe relationships between electrode localization and motor outcomes from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) in early stage Parkinson disease (PD) pilot clinical trial.
Methods: To determine anatomical and network correlates associated with motor outcomes for subjects randomized to early DBS (n = 14), voxelwise sweet spot mapping and structural connectivity analyses were carried out using outcomes of motor progression (Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale Part III [UPDRS-III] 7-day OFF scores [∆baseline➔24 months, MedOFF/StimOFF]) and symptomatic motor improvement (UPDRS-III ON scores [%∆baseline➔24 months, MedON/StimON]).
Results: Sweet spot mapping revealed a location associated with slower motor progression in the dorsolateral STN (anterior/posterior commissure coordinates: 11.