Supplementary motor area in speech initiation: A large-scale intracranial EEG evaluation of stereotyped word articulation.

Speech production engages a distributed network of cortical and subcortical brain regions. The supplementary motor area (SMA) has long been thought to be a key hub in coordinating across these regions to initiate voluntary movements, including speech. We analyzed direct intracranial recordings from 115 patients with epilepsy as they articulated a single word in a subset of trials from a picture-naming task.

Endoscopic third ventriculostomy assisted by augmented reality.

Augmented reality (AR) technology has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, revolutionizing various fields, including medicine and surgery. In neurosurgery, AR holds immense promise for improving the accuracy, efficiency, and safety of various procedures. Augmented reality allows a user to visualize digital information such as 3D models, superimposed on their real-world field of view.

Thalamo-cortical evoked potentials during stimulation of the dentato-rubro-thalamic tract demonstrate synaptic filtering.

Essential tremor DBS targeting the ventral intermediate nucleus (Vim) of the thalamus and its input, the dentato-rubro-thalamic tract (DRTt), has proven to be an effective treatment strategy. We examined thalamo-cortical evoked potentials (TCEPs) and cortical dynamics during stimulation of the DRTt. We recorded TCEPs in primary motor cortex during clinical and supra-clinical stimulation of the DRTt in ten essential tremor patients.

The spatiotemporal dynamics of semantic integration in the human brain.

Language depends critically on the integration of lexical information across multiple words to derive semantic concepts. Limitations of spatiotemporal resolution have previously rendered it difficult to isolate processes involved in semantic integration. We utilized intracranial recordings in epilepsy patients (n = 58) who read written word definitions.

A cost analysis of MR-guided laser interstitial thermal therapy for adult refractory epilepsy.

Objective: MR-guided laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) is used increasingly for refractory epilepsy. The goal of this investigation is to directly compare cost and short-term adverse outcomes for adult refractory epilepsy treated with temporal lobectomy and LITT, as well as to identify risk factors for increased costs and adverse outcomes.

Methods: The National Inpatient Sample (NIS) was queried for patients who received LITT between 2012 and 2019.

Critical role of the ventral temporal lobe in naming.

Objective: Lexical retrieval deficits are characteristic of a variety of different neurological disorders. However, the exact substrates responsible for this are not known. We studied a large cohort of patients undergoing surgery in the dominant temporal lobe for medically intractable epilepsy (n = 95) to localize brain regions that were associated with anomia.

Event-related phase synchronization propagates rapidly across human ventral visual cortex.

Visual inputs to early visual cortex integrate with semantic, linguistic and memory inputs in higher visual cortex, in a manner that is rapid and accurate, and enables complex computations such as face recognition and word reading. This implies the existence of fundamental organizational principles that enable such efficiency. To elaborate on this, we performed intracranial recordings in 82 individuals while they performed tasks of varying visual and cognitive complexity.

Dataset of human intracranial recordings during famous landmark identification.

For most people, recalling information about familiar items in a visual scene is an effortless task, but it is one that depends on coordinated interactions of multiple, distributed neural components. We leveraged the high spatiotemporal resolution of direct intracranial recordings to better delineate the network dynamics underpinning visual scene recognition. We present a dataset of recordings from a large cohort of humans while they identified images of famous landmarks (50 individuals, 52 recording sessions, 6,775 electrodes, 6,541 trials).

NetDI: Methodology Elucidating the Role of Power and Dynamical Brain Network Features That Underpin Word Production.

Canonical language models describe eloquent function as the product of a series of cognitive processes, typically characterized by the independent activation profiles of focal brain regions. In contrast, more recent work has suggested that the interactions between these regions, the cortical networks of language, are critical for understanding speech production. We investigated the cortical basis of picture naming (PN) with human intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings and direct cortical stimulation (DCS), adjudicating between two competing hypotheses: are task-specific cognitive functions discretely computed within well-localized brain regions or rather by distributed networks? The time resolution of ECoG allows direct comparison of intraregional activation measures [high gamma (h ) power] with graph theoretic measures of interregional dynamics.

Category Selectivity for Face and Scene Recognition in Human Medial Parietal Cortex.

The rapid recognition and memory of faces and scenes implies the engagement of category-specific computational hubs in the ventral visual stream with the distributed cortical memory network. To better understand how recognition and identification occur in humans, we performed direct intracranial recordings, in a large cohort of patients (n = 50), from the medial parietal cortex (MPC) and the medial temporal lobe (MTL), structures known to be engaged during face and scene identification. We discovered that the MPC is topologically tuned to face and scene recognition, with clusters in MPC performing scene recognition bilaterally and face recognition in right subparietal sulcus.

Uncovering the functional anatomy of the human insula during speech.

The contribution of insular cortex to speech production remains unclear and controversial given diverse findings from functional neuroimaging and lesional data. To create a precise spatiotemporal map of insular activity, we performed a series of experiments: single-word articulations of varying complexity, non-speech orofacial movements and speech listening, in a cohort of 27 patients implanted with penetrating intracranial electrodes. The posterior insula was robustly active bilaterally, but after the onset of articulation, during listening to speech and during production of non-speech mouth movements.

Dynamic Brain Interactions during Picture Naming.

Brain computations involve multiple processes by which sensory information is encoded and transformed to drive behavior. These computations are thought to be mediated by dynamic interactions between populations of neurons. Here, we demonstrate that human brains exhibit a reliable sequence of neural interactions during speech production.

A lexical semantic hub for heteromodal naming in middle fusiform gyrus.

Semantic memory underpins our understanding of objects, people, places, and ideas. Anomia, a disruption of semantic memory access, is the most common residual language disturbance and is seen in dementia and following injury to temporal cortex. While such anomia has been well characterized by lesion symptom mapping studies, its pathophysiology is not well understood.

Self-contained diffuse optical imaging system for real-time detection and localization of vascular occlusions.

Free flap surgery is a procedure where healthy tissue is transferred from a donor site to a recipient site of the body to fill a defect without maintaining the original blood supply to the flap. The anastomosis of the vascular network of the flap to the blood vessels adjacent to the recipient site has associated risks of arterial and/or venous occlusions that must be promptly detected to avoid temporary or permanent tissue damage. In this work, we present a skin-contact diffusion optical imaging (DOI) system able to continuously provide a three-dimensional representation of the flap oxygenation to promptly detect vascular occlusions potentially occurring in the flap.

Development of grouped icEEG for the study of cognitive processing.

Invasive intracranial EEG (icEEG) offers a unique opportunity to study human cognitive networks at an unmatched spatiotemporal resolution. To date, the contributions of icEEG have been limited to the individual-level analyses or cohorts whose data are not integrated in any way. Here we discuss how grouped approaches to icEEG overcome challenges related to sparse-sampling, correct for individual variations in response and provide statistically valid models of brain activity in a population.