by Ovidiu C. Banea
Questions for TMS research scientific community in Denmark
From November 22nd to November 24th 2017, Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance (DRCMR) will host a new TMS workshop with special focus on multimodal combinations of TMS with other neuroimaging techniques (EEG-TMS, fMRI-TMS).
DRCMR is located in Hvidovre Hospital, a university hospital located at 9 km from Copenhagen which is administered by the Capital Region of Denmark.
Neurophysiology Plus will be represented at this meeting but also during the 20th to 22nd period for a better understanding of the center facilities, protocols used and technical equipment.
We look mostly to have a valuable and critical analysis input from the team leaded by Prof Dr Hartwig Roman Siebner on the Icelandic proposed study.
In this proposed clinical applied research project members of Neurophysiology Unit and Neurosurgery department from Reykjavik University and National University Hospital of Iceland are trying to analyze if TMS-EEG modality can be used or not to assess functional cortical tissue and brain effective connectivity in patients with brain tumors.
In Iceland, another simple technique, TMS motor evoked potentials (TMS-EMG) started to be used for preoperative mapping in 2016. We set and marked the position for the intraoperative direct stimulation (IONM) as in the nineties when this technique was described.
On the beginning of November 2017 neurosurgery department was interested on this procedure of preoperative mapping with neuronavigation. Again we used the available devices and we were able to map motor hotspots of the upper limb and speech area in a healthy subject. On 28th of November the team will investigate and perform motor and speech mapping in two patients with brain tumors located in eloquent areas of the brain. It will be for the first time that neuronavigated mapping is applied and used for the Icelandic brain tumor patients.
And the question remains: Is there a reason to believe that TEPs (TMS-EEG evoked potentials) can be used to assess better the "non-eloquent" brain cortical tissue and give a better map of the non-affected brain areas in order to avoid new post-intervention neurological deficit in patients with brain tumors ?
