Reliability of the TMS-evoked potential in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Juha Gogulski, Christopher C. Cline, Jessica M. Ross, Sara Parmigiani, Corey J. Keller

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

We currently lack a reliable method to probe cortical excitability noninvasively from the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). We recently found that the strength of early and local dlPFC transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)-evoked potentials (EL-TEPs) varied widely across dlPFC subregions. Despite these differences in response amplitude, reliability at each target is unknown. Here we quantified within-session reliability of dlPFC EL-TEPs after TMS to six left dlPFC subregions in 15 healthy subjects. We evaluated reliability (concordance correlation coefficient [CCC]) across targets, time windows, quantification methods, regions of interest, sensor- vs. source-space, and number of trials. On average, the medial target was most reliable (CCC = 0.78) and the most anterior target was least reliable (CCC = 0.24). However, all targets except the most anterior were reliable (CCC > 0.7) using at least one combination of the analytical parameters tested. Longer (20 to 60 ms) and later (30 to 60 ms) windows increased reliability compared to earlier and shorter windows. Reliable EL-TEPs (CCC up to 0.86) were observed using only 25 TMS trials at a medial dlPFC target. Overall, medial dlPFC targeting, wider windows, and peak-to-peak quantification improved reliability. With careful selection of target and analytic parameters, highly reliable EL-TEPs can be extracted from the dlPFC after only a small number of trials.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberbhae130
JournalCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
Volume34
Issue number4
Number of pages14
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2024
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

Fields of Science

  • dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC)
  • electroencephalography (EEG)
  • reliability
  • TMS-evoked potentials (TEPs)
  • transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
  • 3112 Neurosciences

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