Structure-function similarities in deep brain stimulation targets cross-species

• Published in: Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews 2021-12, Vol.131, p.1127-1135
• Main Authors: Keuken, Max C., Alkemade, Anneke, Stevenson, Niek, Innes, Reilly J., Forstmann, Birte U.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brain; Cross-species comparison; DBS; Deep Brain Stimulation - methods; Humans; LDA topic modeling; Parkinson Disease; Subthalamic Nucleus
• ISSN: 0149-7634; 1873-7528
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.10.029

•Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is used in a wide range diseases and disorders.•Identification of DBS areas rely on insights gained from primate and rodent work.•Large-scale automatic meta-analysis for 21 DBS areas cross-species.•Probabilistic topic models used to investigate the structure-function association.•Functional association for the majority of the 21 areas is conserved cross-species. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an effective neurosurgical treatment to alleviate motor symptoms of advanced Parkinson’s disease. Due to its potential, DBS usage is rapidly expanding to target a large number of brain regions to treat a wide range of diseases and neuropsychiatric disorders. The identification and validation of new target regions heavily rely on the insights gained from rodent and primate models. Here we present a large-scale automatic meta-analysis in which the structure-function associations within and between species are compared for 21 DBS targets in humans. The results indicate that the structure-function association for the majority of the 21 included subcortical areas were conserved cross-species. A subset of structures showed overlapping functional association. This can potentially be attributed to shared brain networks and might explain why multiple brain areas are targeted for the same disease or neuropsychiatric disorder.