Effects of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Functional Connectivity

• Activity Number: 266 - Causal Inference in Neuroimaging and Radiology
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 9, 2022 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Imaging
• Author(s): Michael Sobel* and Martin Lindquist
• Companies: Columbia University and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
• Keywords: causal inference; resting state fMRI; functional connectivity

Abstract

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is one of several non-invasive technique for inducing neural activity in specific brain locations by stimulat- ing these areas using magnetic pulses. TMS has been shown to affect various behavioral outcomes and has been demonstrated to be efficacious in the treat- ment of depression. The effects of TMS on neural activity in resting state, our focus here, has also received some attention in prior work. Here, building on prior work by Sobel and Lindquist (2020), who developed a general mul- tisubject, multiregion hierarchical whole brain causal model for fMRI time series data, using the model to study the causal effect of treatments in brain regions of interest in a pain experiment, we modify their model to study the effects of TMS (vs. no TMS or sham TMS) in resting state networks, which are aggregates of brain regions. network.