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Contributed Talk Session: Thursday, August 6, 11:15 am – 12:15 pm, Skirball Theater
Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Functional Localization as a Path to a Cumulative Research Enterprise in Human Intracranial Research

Suseendrakumar Duraivel¹, Eghbal A. Hosseini², Colton Casto³, Rui Xu¹, Ashley Walton⁴, Alan Bush⁴, Angelique Paulk⁴, Sydney Cash⁴, Mark Richardson⁴, Evelina Fedorenko¹; ¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ²Google DeepMind, ³Harvard University, ⁴Massachusetts General Hospital

Presenter: Suseendrakumar Duraivel

Meaningful comparison of neuroscience findings requires assurance that the results pertain to the same brain region across individuals and studies. Human intracranial research enables direct cortical recordings with millisecond resolution, but electrode locations are idiosyncratic across individuals and typically treated as belonging to the same functional system based on coarse anatomy. However, outside primary sensory areas, macroanatomy is an unreliable guide to function due to substantial inter-individual variability in functional topographies. Here, we advocate for functional localization in human intracranial research and demonstrate its feasibility using the language system as a test case. We show that (1) a localizer developed for fMRI reliably identifies language-responsive electrodes; (2) high-gamma power and BOLD signal strength are correlated within participants; and (3) a probabilistic fMRI atlas predicts whether an electrode is language-responsive better than anatomy alone. Thus, functional localization extends straightforwardly to intracranial research and can facilitate across-study comparisons.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding