Finding Precise, Direct, and Personalized Landmarks of Deep Brain Stimulus Tremor Targeting on Advanced MR imaging

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an efficacious treatment for tremors. The clinical outcome is critically dependent on precisely personalized targeting, yet localization of DBS target remains challenging owing to difficulties in resolving individual thalamic nuclei or dentato-rubro-thalamic (DRT) pathways. Here we investigated retrospectively to identify neurosurgical landmarks of DBS targeting by examining the volume overlap and centroid distance between DBS contacts and DRT delineated from quantitative susceptibility imaging. Our findings show a significantly higher volume overlap of DBS contacts with DRT in the good-response tremor group, showing potential of our approach as a direct and personalized neurosurgical guidance tool.