ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Translational Neuroscience
This article is part of the Research TopicIntegrating computational models, including Bayesian models, digital twins, and deep learning, for advancing pre-clinical and clinical neuroscienceView all articles
Individualized Cortico-basal Ganglia Network Effective Connectivity Predicts Outcomes of STN-DBS in Patients with Parkinson's disease
Provisionally accepted
- 1China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Beijing, China
- 2Beijing Tiantan Hospital Department of Neurosurgery, Beijing, China
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
Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an effective treatment for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. However, postoperative outcomes vary with no reliable predictive method. Methods: Our study involves 43 PD patients undergoing STN-DBS. Preoperative resting-state functional magnetic resonance imagings (rs-fMRI) were collected. The volume of tissue activated (VTA) was defined based on contact points and stimulation parameters. A model of the cortico-basal ganglia network was established using dynamic causal modeling. The correlation between the UPDRS-III and the network edges was determined through Pearson correlation analysis. Furthermore, a generalized linear model was employed to predict the post-DBS motor improvement. Results: Individual STN-VTA intersections were found to be important to UPDRS-III improvement induced by DBS (R = 0.59, P = 0.001). STN-VTA intersections were related to the thalamic-primary motor cortex (M1) (R = 0.47, P = 0.005), and M1-STN (R = 0.40, P = 0.006) coupling strength. The coupling strength of Thal-M1 (R = 0.442, P = 0.009) and M1-STN (R = 0.481 P = 0.004) resulted in DBS-induced movement enhancement, particularly rigidity. The strength of effective connections within the STN-Thal-M1 pathway was found to predict improvements in UPDRS-III scores (P=0.003). Conclusion: Our study confirmed the relationship between clinical improvements in STN-DBS and target location as well as the stimulation parameters. By constructing personalized cortical-basal ganglia network models based on target location as well as the stimulation parameters, we discovered that the effective connection strength in STN-THA-M1 can predict motor improvement in PD patients undergoing STN-DBS.
Keywords: cortico-basal ganglia network, Deep Brain Stimulation, individual, Parkinson's disease, Volume of Tissue Activated
Received: 13 Nov 2025; Accepted: 15 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Diao, Hu, Fan, Fan and Zhang. 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: Yu Diao
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.