Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience Systems Neuroscience
This review focuses on approaches in which connectivity mapping and TMS can be used in conjunction to study neurological and psychiatric disorders in order to provide a sense of the more common available techniques and examples of these approaches.
Abstract
and Rushworth, 1999), sustained cognitive disturbances induced by TMS in humans have not been observed (Pascual-Leone et al. have been published. In this review, we focus primarily on approaches in which connectivity mapping and TMS can be used in conjunction to study neurological and psychiatric disorders in order to provide a sense of the more common available techniques and examples of these approaches. By connectivity mapping, we mean imaging techniques that assess connectivity between distal brain areas, such as functional connectivity analyses and diffusion tensor imaging. Thus, we focus primarily on TMS studies of interregional , rather than intraregional, connectivity. Another form of non-invasive brain stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, can produce changes in brain excitability that can persist for a period of time after stimulation (Priori, 2003). To date, this technology has been less extensively used in conjunction with connectivity mapping, and will not be covered in this review except to note that several recent papers have reported that tDCS may modulate distal brain areas via inter