Portable neuroimaging and computational modeling approach to elucidate potential cognitive confounds in non-invasive stimulation of the motor cerebellum

Abstract

I read with great interest the correspondence by Robert M. Hardwick, Amanda S. Therrien, and Elise Lesage describing cognitive confounds during non-invasive stimulation of the motor cerebellum [1]. Indeed, the high likelihood of cognitive effects of cerebellar transcranial stimulation is possible unless we optimize the electrode montage based on the cerebellar lobule-specific electric field distribution e see Fig. 1 adapted from Ref. [2]. Therefore, we augmented the freely available modeling pipelines for transcranial stimulation [3,4] with the ability to isolate cerebellar lobules based on Spatially Unbiased Infratentorial Template for the Cerebellum atlas [5] (Diedrichsen et al., 2009) that allowed optimization of lobule-specific electric fields distributions [6]. Our computational pipeline was applied to show individual differences at the