Matteo Vissani

Massachusetts General Hospital | MGH · Functional Neurosurgery Brain Modulation Lab

Neurosurgical procedures that enable direct brain recordings in awake patients offer unique opportunities to explore the neurophysiology of human speech. The scarcity of these opportunities and the altruism of participating patients compel us to apply the highest rigor to signal analysis. Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) signals recorded...

Objective The progression of impulsive-compulsive behaviors (ICB) in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) following subthalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery displays a large inter-patient variability. However, the link between the subthalamic neural activity at the single-neuron level and the postoperative evolution of ICB remains unclear. In this stud...

Mapping circuits for DBS. Within the enigmatic depths of an aquatic universe, divers use flashlights to reveal the hidden contours of an uncharted seabed that teems with wondrous vegetation. In an analogous exploration, Hollunder et al. describe how invasive brain stimulation delivered to deep-seated brain nuclei may act as a beacon. Using deep br...

Frontal circuits play a critical role in motor, cognitive and affective processing, and their dysfunction may result in a variety of brain disorders. However, exactly which frontal domains mediate which (dys)functions remains largely elusive. We studied 534 deep brain stimulation electrodes implanted to treat four different brain disorders. By anal...

Background: Upper limb (UL) motor impairment following stroke is a leading cause of functional limitations in activities of daily living. Robot-assisted therapy supports rehabilitation, but how its efficacy and the underlying neural mechanisms depend on the time after stroke is yet to be assessed. Aim: We investigated the response to an intensiv...

Speaking evokes modulation of neuronal activity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN), a basal ganglia node that receives both mono- and polysynaptic inputs from cortex and subcortex. Indeed, speech provides a rich context for exploring interactions within human cortical-basal ganglia circuits, but direct intracranial recordings are rare. Here, we synch...

Objective Here, we report a retrospective, single‐center experience with a novel deep brain stimulation (DBS) device capable of chronic local field potential (LFP) recording in drug‐resistant epilepsy (DRE) and explore potential electrophysiological biomarkers that may aid DBS programming and outcome tracking. Methods Five patients with DRE underw...

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has revolutionized the treatment of neurological disorders, yet the mechanisms of DBS are still under investigation. Computational models are important in silico tools for elucidating these underlying principles and potentially for personalizing DBS therapy to individual patients. The basic principles under...

Neurosurgical procedures, in which electrodes can be placed in the brain of awake patients, offer remarkable opportunities to discover the neurophysiology underlying human speech. The relative scarcity of these opportunities and the altruism of participating patients obligates us to apply the highest possible rigor to signal interpretation. Intracr...

The frontal cortex is involved in motor, cognitive, and affective brain functions. In humans, however, neuroanatomy-function mappings are predominantly derived from correlative neuroimaging studies. Hence, exactly which frontal domains causally mediate which function remains largely elusive. Herein, we leverage a strategy that allows for causal inf...

Background Huntington's disease (HD) is a hereditary neurodegenerative disease leading to cognitive and motor impairment. HD depends on basal ganglia dysfunctions, but the role of subthalamic nucleus (STN) neurons is not completely known. Drug-resistant motor symptoms of HD can be alleviated by neuromodulation of the basal ganglia through Deep Bra...

Following its introduction in 2014 and with support of a broad international community, the open-source toolbox Lead-DBS has evolved into a comprehensive neuroimaging platform dedicated to localizing, reconstructing, and visualizing electrodes implanted in the human brain, in the context of deep brain stimulation (DBS) and epilepsy monitoring. Expa...

We are delighted to present you the Proceedings of the 2022 CNS meeting. The CNS meeting encourages approaches that combine theoretical, computational, and experimental work in the neurosciences, and provides an opportunity for participants to share their views. The abstracts corresponding to speakers' talks and posters are what you find collected...

Objective The Globus Pallidus pars interna (GPi) is one of the main targets for Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) therapies for dystonia and other movement disorders. Still, a complete picture of the spiking dynamics of the nucleus is far from being achieved. Microelectrode recordings (MER) provide a unique brain window opportunity to shed light on GPi...

Conflictual cues and unexpected changes in human real-case scenarios may be detrimental to the execution of tasks by artificial agents, thus affecting their performance. Meta-learning applied to reinforcement learning may enhance the design of control algorithms, where an outer learning system progressively adjusts the operation of an inner learnin...

The epileptic brain is the result of a sequence of events transforming normal neuronal populations into hyperexcitable networks supporting recurrent seizure generation. These modifications are known to induce fundamental alterations of circuit function and, ultimately, of behavior. However, how hyperexcitability affects information processing in co...

The continuous stream of multisensory information between the brain and the body during body-environment interactions is crucial to maintain the updated representation of the perceived dimensions of body parts (metric body representation) and the space around the body (the peripersonal space). Such flow of multisensory signals is often limited by u...

Introduction: Neurocircuits are involved in the motor, cognitive, and affective dysfunctions of multiple brain disorders. Functional segregation into these domains has been widely defined on a fronto-cortical basis. However, despite considerable interaction, these functional domains remain partitioned to some extent at (sub)thalamic levels (1). To...

Impulsive–compulsive behaviors (ICB) are over‐represented in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Neurons in the ventral subthalamic nucleus (STN) might play a predominant role in the modulation of impulsivity. We characterized the firing regularity of 742 subthalamic neurons from 24 PD patients (12 ICB+ and 12 ICB‐) in an OFF medication state. We co...

Foreword from the editors. We hosted four keynote speakers: Wolf Singer, Bill Bialek, Danielle Bassett, and Sonja Gruen. They enlightened us about computations in the cerebral cortex, the reduction of high-dimensional data, the emerging field of computational psychiatry, and the significance of spike patterns in motor cortex. From the submissions,...

Excessive beta-band oscillations in the subthalamic nucleus are key neural features of Parkinson’s disease. Yet the distinctive contributions of beta low and high bands, their dependency on striatal dopamine, and their correlates with movement kinematics are unclear. Here, we show that the movement phases of the reach-to-grasp motor task are coded...

Background Impulsive‐compulsive behaviors are common in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. However, the basal ganglia dysfunctions associated with high impulsivity have not been fully characterized. The objective of this study was to identify the features associated with impulsive‐compulsive behaviors in single neurons of the subthalamic nucleus (S...

Objective: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an established and valid therapy for a variety of pathological conditions ranging from motor to cognitive disorders. Still, much of the DBS-related mechanism of action is far from being understood, and there are several side effects of DBS whose origin is unclear. In the last years DBS limitations have be...

Postural instability, in particular at gait initiation (GI), and resulting falls are a major determinant of poor quality of life in subjects with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Still, the contribution of the basal ganglia and dopamine on the feedforward postural control associated with this motor task is poorly known. In addition, the influence of anthr...

Objective: Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) of basal ganglia effectively tackles motor symptoms of movement disorders such as Tourette Syndrome (TS). The precise location of target stimulation site determines the range of clinical outcome in DBS patients, and the occurrence of side-effects of DBS. DBS implant procedures currently localize stimulation...

Basal ganglia dysfunctions have been suggested to play a causal role in the pathophysiology of most motor and non-motor symptoms of movement disorders as Tourette Syndrome (TS) or Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Intra/post-operative recordings from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) during Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) procedures in PD patients have highlighte...

The lesions induced by unilateral strokes perturb the complex and critical interhemispheric balance. While a high asymmetry measured in the acute phase is known to be a predictor for poor motor recovery, the evolution of this imbalance along motor recovery has not been studied. Here, we evaluated the evolution of the cortical power asymmetry during...

Background: When single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is applied over the primary motor cortex (M1) with sufficient intensity, it evokes muscular contractions (motor-evoked potentials, MEPs) and muscle twitches (TMS-evoked movements). Participants may also report various hand sensations related to TMS, but the perception elicited b...

The Peripersonal Space (PPS), the space immediately surrounding the body, is coded in a multisensory, body part-centered (e.g hand-centered, trunk-centered), modular fashion. This coding is ascribed to multisensory neurons that integrate tactile stimuli on a specific body part (e.g. hand, trunk) with visual/auditory information occurring near the s...