Temporal fingerprints of TMS-evoked potentials across thalamocortical circuits
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Background
Electroencephalographic (EEG) potentials evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) offer a direct window into cortical dynamics. Yet, a systematic exploration of their morphological features, analogous to sensory-evoked potentials, is lacking, especially for stimulation outside the motor cortex.
Aim
To obtain region-specific properties of frontal, parietal and occipital networks from the time course of TMS-evoked potentials (TEPs).
Materials and Methods
We implemented and applied an automatic procedure to compute peak-to-peak amplitude, peak latency, and inter-peak interval of TEPs recorded from 40 neurotypical subjects stimulated over left occipital (n=25), parietal (n=25), and frontal (n=25) cortices.
Results
Occipital TEPs showed the largest peak-to-peak amplitude and longest latency of the first waveform component, independently of stimulation intensity and consistent with the recruitment of a large patch of densely interconnected neurons. Concerning later components, both latency and inter-peak interval systematically decreased along the posterior-to-anterior axis, reflecting progressively faster recurrent dynamics from the alpha-dominated occipital circuitry to the tightly coupled loops between frontal cortex and subcortical structures. Parietal TEPs showed intermediate amplitude and latency measures, consistent with the heterogeneous cytoarchitectonic and connectional organization of the superior parietal cortex.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that TEP morphology is shaped by the distinct properties of the stimulated networks, with early amplitude reflecting the extent of local recruitment and later temporal features tracking the rhythm of recurrent activity. This work offers a mechanistically grounded and practically accessible approach, also released as a Python-based tool, that allows to characterize cortical reactivity across different brain-states and populations.
