ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Neuroscience Methods and Techniques
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1592689
Deep brain stimulation in globus pallidus internus travels to thalamus and subthalamic nuclei along physiological pathways
Provisionally accepted
Maral Kasiri1*
Jessica Vidmark1Estefania Hernandez-Martin1S Alireza Seyyed Mousavi1
Terence David Sanger1,2*- 1University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States
- 2Children's Hospital of Orange County, Orange, California, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neuromodulation method for treatment of various neurological disorders. Research on DBS has often focused on local inhibition or excitation effects, at the site of stimulation. However, it is well known that DBS can lead to robust evoked potentials (EP) not only at the stimulation site, representing the local effect, but also in distant brain regions, representing the effects on distant targets. While the significance of these EPs for therapeutic outcomes is not known, it appears that the electrical effects of DBS have a partial modulatory impact on downstream targets. Nonetheless, it partly remains unclear through what mechanism DBS pulses travel to the distant targets or what portion of the pulses travel along the normal pathways from the stimulation site. The possible scenarios include orthodromic or antidromic pathways, accessory pathways, normally inhibited pathways, and direct electromagnetic activation of distant sites. The ability to record signals from brain regions provides an opportunity to determine the mechanism of DBS signal transmission. We hypothesize that the pathways that transmit DBS pulses include the pathways that transmit intrinsic neural signals. To test this, we performed a transfer function analysis on deep brain recordings during DBS-off condition and compared its impulse response with the transmission of signals from electrical stimulation during DBS-on condition. Our results support our claim that the electrical pulses travel partly along intrinsic neural pathways by showing that the DBS-EPs can be partially predicted by observation of intrinsic neural activity.
Keywords: Deep Brain Stimulation, Empirical transfer function, Signal Transmission, movement disorder, DBS mechanism
Received: 12 Mar 2025; Accepted: 02 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kasiri, Vidmark, Hernandez-Martin, Seyyed Mousavi and Sanger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Maral Kasiri, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States
Terence David Sanger, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.