Deep brain stimulation induced normalization of the human functional connectome in Parkinson ’s disease

AbstractNeuroimaging has seen a paradigm shift away from a formal description of local activity patterns towards studying distributed brain networks. The recently defined framework of the ‘human connectome’ enables global analysis of parts of the brain and their interconnections. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an invasive therapy for patients with severe movement disorders aiming to retune abnormal brain network activity by local high frequency stimulation of the basal ganglia. Beyond clinical utility, DBS represents a powerful research platform to study functional connectomics and the modulation of distributed brain networks in the human brain. We acquired resting-state functional MRI in 20 patients with Parkinson’s disease with subthalamic DBS switched on and off. An a ge-matched control cohort of 15 subjects was acquired from an open data repository. DBS lead placement in the subthalamic nucleus was localized using a state-of-the art pipeline that involved brain shift correction, multispectral image registration and use of a precise subcortical atlas. Based on a realistic 3D model of the electrode and surrounding anatomy, the amount of local impact of DBS was estimated using a finite element method approach. On a global level, average connectivity increases and decreases throughout the brain were estimated by contrasting on and off DBS scans on a voxel-wise graph comprising eight thousand nodes. Local impact of DBS on the motor subthalamic nucleus explained half the...
Source: Brain - Category: Neurology Source Type: research