Lead-DBS on the cover of Annals of Neurology
We’re really excited that the current cover of AoN was made with Lead-DBS. It shows pallidal and thalamic electrodes simultaneously implanted in a patient suffering from Tourette’s Syndrom and the picture is part of an electrophysiological Berlin-Hannover study spearheaded by Wolf-Julian Neumann and led by Andrea Kühn. It is the sixth coverart made with Lead-DBS that we know of – a gallery can be found here.
Important methodological updates for Lead-DBS
We are thrilled that the Lead-DBS v2 methodological paper is out in NeuroImage.
[An unpaywalled preprint can be found here].
Lead-DBS was developed since 2012 and the first methods paper published in 2014. Since then, nearly everything has changed – and this led us to writing up the aforementioned updated methods paper. In the manuscript, we describe tools for multispectral nonlinear registration, structural/functional connectivity analyses, brain shift correction, reconstruction of microelectrode recordings and orientation detection of segmented DBS leads. The long author list reflects how many people have contributed to Lead-DBS development since then.
One particularly important processing step is nonlinear registration (patient brains to an atlas or the other way around). Currently, ten approaches to do so are readily built into Lead-DBS and each comes with adjustable settings. Thus, it became very important to investigate and quantify results that may originate from those different approaches. In a marathon effort spearheaded by Siobhan Ewert and led by Todd M Herrington that involved >11,000 nonlinear warps, the two most promising normalization approaches were identified – ANTs based multispectral SyN registration as well as multispectram SPM-based segmentation – which are now the default choices in Lead-DBS. In fact, automatic segmentations of the STN/GPi performed using those approaches were marginally if not at all significantly worse than manual expert segmentations.
Their article can be found here.
Finally, a new study out of Bern/Oxford validated the default STN atlas defined in Lead-DBS (Siobhan Ewert’s DISTAL atlas) using microelectrode recordings. This important work showed that anatomical and electrophysiological accuracy was highest for the DISTAL atlas when comparing it to two different atlases of the STN. The article can be found here.
Brain Sciences Special Issue “Modulatory Effects of Deep Brain Stimulation on Distributed Brain Networks”
I am editing a special issue in the #openaccess journal Brain Sciences about
In case you are working on topics that combine brain stimulation with connectomics, would like to write a review or short report in that domain, please consider submitting to this issue – deadline is july 2019.
Dear Colleagues,
The field of deep brain stimulation (DBS) is currently experiencing a paradigm-shift, from studying impacts on local brain tissue toward the analysis of modulatory effects on distributed brain networks. With the rise of modern non-invasive neuroimaging methods, this local-to-global shift bears promising potential to better-understand brain disorders, brain function, and to translate novel concepts into clinical practice. Already, network-based targets that may guide surgical planning and DBS programming are being introduced and prospectively validated with the potential to revolutionize the field.
In this Special Issue, we will discuss the indications, potentials, efficacy and validation of network-based brain stimulation concepts with a special focus on DBS. These include the combination of DBS imaging with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion-weighted imaging based tractography and electrophysiological measures such as electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography and local field potential recordings.
