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. 2020 Mar 11;9:e51956. doi: 10.7554/eLife.51956

Movement-related coupling of human subthalamic nucleus spikes to cortical gamma

Petra Fischer 1,2,, Witold J Lipski 3, Wolf-Julian Neumann 4, Robert S Turner 5,6, Pascal Fries 7,8, Peter Brown 1,2, R Mark Richardson 9,10,
Editors: Nicole C Swann11, Laura L Colgin12
PMCID: PMC7096181  PMID: 32159515

Abstract

Cortico-basal ganglia interactions continuously shape the way we move. Ideas about how this circuit works are based largely on models those consider only firing rate as the mechanism of information transfer. A distinct feature of neural activity accompanying movement, however, is increased motor cortical and basal ganglia gamma synchrony. To investigate the relationship between neuronal firing in the basal ganglia and cortical gamma activity during movement, we analysed human ECoG and subthalamic nucleus (STN) unit activity during hand gripping. We found that fast reaction times were preceded by enhanced STN spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling, indicating a role in motor preparation. Importantly, increased gamma phase coupling occurred independent of changes in mean STN firing rates, and the relative timing of STN spikes was offset by half a gamma cycle for ipsilateral vs. contralateral movements, indicating that relative spike timing is as relevant as firing rate for understanding cortico-basal ganglia information transfer.

Research organism: Human

Introduction

Oscillations in extracellular field potential recordings reflect the synchronous rhythmic activation of thousands of nearby neurons capturing a mixture of sub- and suprathreshold activity (Buzsáki et al., 2012). At the onset of contralateral movements, relatively narrow gamma-band oscillations (~60–90 Hz) appear in the human basal ganglia, thalamus and motor cortex (Brücke et al., 2008; Brücke et al., 2012; Brücke et al., 2013; Muthukumaraswamy, 2010; Jenkinson et al., 2013). The potential significance of these oscillations is illustrated by the fact that neural activity synchronizes strongly only when movements are actively initiated, but not during similar passive displacements (Liu et al., 2008; Muthukumaraswamy, 2010; Brücke et al., 2012). The Communication-through-Coherence theory describes how gamma synchrony can be a key feature of interregional interactions, with brief windows of increased excitability between longer periods of inhibition (Hasenstaub et al., 2005; Fries et al., 2007; Buzsáki and Wang, 2012) rendering neuronal communication effective, precise and selective (Fries, 2015). One consequence of synchronized spiking activity is that where multiple cells converge onto a postsynaptic neuron, volleys of near-coincident spikes are more likely to trigger action potentials downstream (Azouz and Gray, 2003; Harris et al., 2003; Gupta et al., 2016). Neural synchronization could thus potentially trigger the currently unknown cascade of network interactions enabling movement execution. Uncontrolled movements recorded during levodopa-induced dyskinesia in Parkinson’s disease are for example accompanied by excessive gamma synchrony between the STN and motor cortex (Swann et al., 2016). Gamma phase coupling between the STN LFP and motor cortex has also been shown during voluntary movements, with the former seemingly driving the latter (Williams et al., 2002; Litvak et al., 2012; Sharott et al., 2018). Moreover, dopaminergic medication enhances gamma synchrony in Parkinson’s disease (Litvak et al., 2012), suggesting it may be functionally relevant for restoring these patients’ ability to move.

Previously, it has been shown that changes in STN spike rhythmicity and phase coupling to cortical oscillations (focusing on frequencies below the gamma range) can occur before movement onset in the absence of changes in average firing rates (Lipski et al., 2017b). The precise temporal pattern of basal ganglia spikes relative to cortical population activity thus seems critical for understanding how the basal ganglia can contribute to motor control. Yet, studies on neural correlates of movement preparation and execution in the basal ganglia have mostly focussed only on changes in firing rates (Anderson and Horak, 1985; Mink and Thach, 1991; Turner and Anderson, 1997; Seo et al., 2012; Arimura et al., 2013). Hence not much is known about the relationship between gamma coupling and gating of activity for motor control, despite rapidly growing knowledge about the relevance of temporally organized activity for visual processing (Fries, 2015) and working memory encoding (Bastos et al., 2018).

We simultaneously recorded STN unit activity and electrocorticography from the motor cortex during isolated contra- or ipsilateral hand gripping movements to gain insights into mechanisms of cortico-basal ganglia communication that may be linked to gamma-rhythmic activity.

Inspired by previous findings that have demonstrated strong correlation between movement kinematics and basal ganglia gamma-band activity (Brücke et al., 2012; Fischer et al., 2017; Lofredi et al., 2018), we aim to shed light on the underlying neurophysiological mechanism resulting in cortico-subcortical communication in the gamma band. Therefore, we set out to examine if STN spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling can predict the timing or vigour of contralateral action initiation. Second, because only contra- and not ipsilateral movements are accompanied by strongly increased motor cortical gamma synchrony (Crone et al., 1998; Cheyne et al., 2008) and result in more discharge activity (Matsunami and Hamada, 1981), we further characterized and compared the relationship between the precise timing of STN spikes and the cortical gamma phase. More specifically, if the timing of STN spikes helps to enhance gamma oscillations exclusively during contralateral gripping, then spikes during ipsilateral gripping may be clustered around points that are opposite to the preferred phase found during contralateral gripping to prevent a coincidental boost in gamma synchrony.

Results

Cortical ECoG and STN single neuron spikes were recorded in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery. Patients performed a visually-cued gripping task in which they squeezed a handgrip with their left or right hand within 2 s after the Go cue for at least 100 ms (Figure 1). Our analysis included 28 spike recordings from 12 patients (12 single-unit and 16 multi-unit recordings), from which spike-phase coupling to lower frequencies have been described previously (Lipski et al., 2017b).

Figure 1. Schematic of the trial events for a grip trial with the right hand.

Figure 1.

In trials requesting gripping with the left hand, the image of the hand would be displayed to the left of the traffic light. The initial cue was displayed as yellow traffic light, which served as GO cue when it turned green, on average 1.5 ± 0.4 s after its onset. The gripping movement had to occur within two seconds of the GO cue onset to count as valid trial. Upon gripping, a white bar representing the grip force would move up (see bottom right corner in the rightmost plot). Visual feedback was presented according to whether the movement was performed at least for 100 ms and within the correct window. Trial onsets were on average separated by 4.7s ± 1.2s.

Gripping performance

Average reaction times from the Go signal to the grip onset were 0.53 ± (SD) 0.21 s and 0.55 ± 0.18 s for contra- and ipsilateral grips, respectively (contra-ipsi: p=0.435, t27 = −0.8). The mean variability (SD) of RTs within each patient was 0.19 ± 0.09 s and 0.23 ± 0.12 s (contra-ipsi: p=0.050, t27 = −2.1). This variability in RTs allowed us to compare the extent of spike-to-gamma phase coupling between trials with fast and slow RTs by grouping trials with RTs below the median and trials with RTs above the median. The average RTs of these two sets were 0.39 ± 0.16 s and 0.68 ± 0.27 s for grips contralateral to the recorded STN and 0.38 ± 0.12 s and 0.72 ± 0.26 s for ipsilateral grips. The delay between the cue that instructed patients whether to perform the grip with the right or left hand and the Go signal did not differ significantly between short and long RT trials (difference in delay between long vs. short RT trials = 4 ms, p=0.116). We also performed median-splits according to grip peak force and peak yank (contralateral gripping peak force: 91 ± 65 N and 104 ± 71 N, peak yank: 0.39 ± 0.30 N/ms and 0.50 ± 0.36 N/ms). The average grip duration was 0.98 ± 0.45 s.

Topography of STN spike-to-cortical gamma coupling

First, we assessed if movement-related STN spike-to-cortical gamma coupling was specific to a region of primary motor cortex that has also been demonstrated to show the strongest movement-related gamma power increase in MEG recordings Figure 2B, adapted from Cheyne et al. (2008). This MEG study has shown a contralateral gamma increase at highly specific spatial locations for individual limb movements, which was highly consistent over repeated measurements and sessions (Cheyne et al., 2008; Cheyne, 2013).

Figure 2. Cortical topography of STN spike-to-cortical gamma coupling and power changes.

(A) ECoG strips were distributed mainly over precentral and parietal areas. ECoG coordinates from recordings performed in the left hemisphere were flipped in the x-axis to allow averaging across recordings performed in the left and right hemisphere. The maximum number of overlapping recordings was 18 (dark areas). (B) A magnetoencephalography study in healthy participants showed independently from our study that gamma oscillations at the onset of finger movements are focal to lateral motor cortex (Cheyne et al., 2008). (C) Gamma power increased most strongly over motor and somatosensory cortical areas during contralateral gripping. (D) Beta power decreased in spatially more widespread areas. (E) The left and right plots show the two sets of sites that showed the highest 60–80 Hz STN spike-to-cortical gamma coupling during contralateral and ipsilateral gripping, respectively. Each set includes one single site per recorded hemisphere (n = 28). These sites were chosen for further analyses. (F) As (E) but reduced to the sites showing significant gamma coupling −0.1–0.4 s around movement onset (α = 0.1 to show the location of a larger number of contacts). If several channels of one recording were significant, only the channel with the highest PLV was included. The contacts that showed significant gamma PLV during contralateral gripping were concentrated over precentral cortex. This hotspot corresponds well with the 60–90 Hz gamma source localized in MEG studies (Cheyne et al., 2008) shown in B). The significant contacts for ipsilateral gripping were scattered over a wider area. See also Figure 2—figure supplement 1.

© 2008 Elsevier

Figure 2B is reprinted with permission from Cheyne et al. (2008) . It is not covered by the CC-BY 4.0 licence and further reproduction of this panel would need permission from the copyright holder.

Figure 2.

Figure 2—figure supplement 1. Distribution of coupling strength across all ECoG sites in one example subject recorded with a grid that had 28 contacts.

Figure 2—figure supplement 1.

The black dots show the positions of all ECoG electrodes (axially projected). The red blobs are centred around the mean of the position of the two contacts used to compute the bipolar ECoG signal, colouring the cortical mesh within a 3 mm radius from this midpoint. Red indicates high coupling, blue (values below zero) indicates no coupling. During contralateral gripping (1st plot) coupling was highest over precentral gyrus, particularly around the region that is known to show high gamma synchrony during hand movements. Two sites showed significant coupling (2nd plot) during contralateral gripping. During ipsilateral gripping, coupling was weaker (3rd plot) and the only significant site was located over the middle frontal gyrus. PPC = pairwise phase consistency.

ECoG strips were distributed predominantly over precentral and parietal areas and were always located in the same hemisphere as the recorded STN (Figure 2A). Because other studies have already clearly demonstrated the presence of finely tuned gamma activity and coupling in cortex and the STN (Litvak et al., 2012: Figures 5 and 6; Cheyne et al., 2008), we took a hypothesis-driven approach and focussed specifically on analysing STN spike coupling with 60–80 Hz cortical gamma activity in a 500 ms window around movement onset. Cortical power in the 12–30 Hz beta and the 60–80 Hz gamma frequency bands was modulated at movement onset (−0.1–0.4 s around grip onset) in bipolar contact pairs situated predominantly in primary motor and sensory areas (Figure 2 C+D), which is in line with past ECoG studies (Ohara et al., 2000; Pfurtscheller et al., 2003). Note that gamma power increased specifically for contralateral and not ipsilateral movements. Within-subjects correlations between the magnitude of the relative power changes in the beta and gamma band at contralateral movement onset did not significantly differ from zero at the group level, suggesting that they were uncorrelated with each other (mean R = 0.05, p=0.785, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, n = 28).

The bipolar contact pairs with the strongest cortical gamma phase coupling to STN spikes during contralateral gripping per spike recording were concentrated in lateral precentral gyrus (Figure 2E), a site, which corresponds strikingly well to the hotspot of 60–90 Hz gamma synchronization r in a previous MEG study that presumably identifies primary hand motor cortex Figure 2B, adapted from Cheyne et al. (2008). The spatial focus of coupling during contralateral gripping becomes even clearer when only the sites are displayed for which movement-related STN-spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling reached significance relative to a permutation distribution (Figure 2F). The sites that showed significant coupling during ipsilateral gripping were more widely dispersed and were shifted toward somatosensory cortex. The significance tests in Figure 2F show that gamma coupling was higher relative to a pre-movement period and relative to shuffled data, confirming that the increase exclusively occurred at movement onset and was not already present at rest. Sites with the highest coupling during contralateral and ipsilateral gripping were separately selected for further analyses.

Movement-related STN spike-to-cortical gamma coupling

To evaluate changes in coupling across the whole task period and across multiple frequencies at the group-level, we employed a novel procedure that ensured that the time-frequency plots depict changes in the data locked to each task event. Each trial began with a Left/Right cue that was followed by a GO signal, movement onset and movement offset (Figure 1). To calculate coupling strength for multiple time points and make sure the values are comparable, the number of spikes going into the calculation should be kept constant for each point because smaller numbers would result in inflated coupling values. Intervals between events were divided into equidistant points for each trial so that the variability of these intervals across trials and subjects did not affect the accuracy of the data alignment around important task events. The windows centred around these points were scaled such that each window contained the same number of spikes to then compute the phase locking value (PLV) for this point (see Methods). Movement-related cortical power changes showed a broad power increase between 60–150 Hz (Figure 3B) that is typically observed in ECoG recordings. Such broad power increases can reflect both true oscillatory components as well as non-oscillatory broadband activity capturing short neural events (Ray and Maunsell, 2011). To focus on the 60–80 Hz oscillatory component of interest, we pre-selected the ECoG contacts with the highest PLV between 60–80 Hz over a −0.1–0.4 s period around movement onset (Figure 2E). Accordingly, STN firing was consistently phase-locked to cortical gamma at movement onset in these sites across all recordings (Figure 3A, n = 28). The significant cluster shows that coupling strength was higher than that obtained from a permutation distribution, which was generated by shuffling the association between STN spike trains and cortical LFP gamma phase time courses across trials, while keeping the respective individual trials intact. The cluster highlights that in the selected sites, above-chance coupling was relatively constrained to a narrow spectral window in the gamma band and centred narrowly in time on movement onset instead of being widespread, which would have been possible in principle, despite the selection criterion. Figure 3—figure supplement 2 shows the spike-triggered average of the 60–80 Hz filtered ECoG signal of three example recordings demonstrating clear locking around contralateral grip onset but not in a pre-movement period. During ipsilateral gripping, no significant clusters in coupling between STN spikes and the gamma phase of this pre-selected set of ECoG sites were found (Figure 3A, bottom row) and no significant gamma increase was present (Figure 3B). The cortical high-frequency activity (HFA, described in Methods) as a proxy of local discharge activity was also significantly higher during contra- versus ipsilateral gripping (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, n = 28, p=0.001).

Figure 3. STN spike-to-ECoG phase coupling and ECoG power during visually cued gripping.

The top and bottom row show contra- and ipsilateral grip trials, respectively. To get comparable estimates of the coupling strength around each of the key trial events, we implemented an event-locked variable-window width PLV estimation procedure: Each interval between neighbouring task events was subdivided into equidistant points, which served as centre for a window within which the PLV was computed. The windows varied in width to encompass the same number of spikes for all time points for one recording. (A) The black outlines show significant clusters obtained with a cluster-based permutation procedure for multiple comparison correction (n = 28, p<0.05). Significant 60–80 Hz spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling occurred at contralateral grip onset. The same cells also locked to beta after movement offset when cortical beta power rebounded. During ipsilateral gripping (bottom row), no significant clusters were found. (B) During contralateral gripping, cortical gamma power increased while beta power was significantly suppressed relative to the median power obtained from the whole recording. Ipsilateral gripping resulted in relatively reduced >120 Hz power after the grip was released. (C) Average firing rates across the 28 recordings showed no significant modulation to any of the task events. Error bars display standard errors. See also Figure 3—figure supplements 15.

Figure 3—source data 1. Source data for Figure 3 showing contralateral grip trials.
Figure 3—source data 2. Source data for Figure 3 showing ipsilateral grip trials.

Figure 3.

Figure 3—figure supplement 1. Example of the event-locked variable-window width sliding procedure.

Figure 3—figure supplement 1.

Intervals between neighbouring events (♦) were subdivided into eight equidistant points for each trial, which served as centres for overlapping bins within which PLVs were calculated. Window widths were set depending on the total number of spikes surrounding each bin centre across all trials. The grey horizontal bars denote the window widths, which were the same for all trials of one individual bin centre. Windows between the Go signal and Grip onset were relatively wide because the average spike number around this point was relatively low. Conversely, windows between Grip onset and end were relatively narrow as spikes were more frequent. For any recording, a minimum number of 50 spikes (across all trials for one bin) was included, or more, if the average number of spikes within an average 0.3 s window was higher.
Figure 3—figure supplement 2. Spike-triggered average (STA) of the 60–80 Hz filtered ECoG signal during contralateral gripping of three example recordings.

Figure 3—figure supplement 2.

The ECoG signal was taken from the sites with highest 60–80 Hz coupling during gripping. The blue lines show the STA based on spikes within −0.1–0.4 s around movement onset. The grey lines show the STA based on spikes within a pre-movement period starting −3 s before movement onset. For the latter, the same number of spikes as found around movement onset was included. The window shows 42 ms around the time of the spikes (black dashed line), which includes three gamma cycles, each lasting 14 ms. The beginning and end of the central gamma cycle is marked by grey-dashed lines. The gamma oscillation in the spike-triggered average was only clearly visible at movement onset (blue lines). Note also that the timing of the spikes relative to the gamma cycle was similar across the three recordings – spikes tended to occur close to the trough. One possible confound in (A) may be that periods of strong gamma oscillations around movement onset had a higher amplitude. Here, the signal only was filtered. However, in (B) the amplitude of the signal was the same in both periods as the phase was extracted with a Hilbert-transform of the filtered signal and then back-transformed into an oscillation with a constant amplitude by computing the cosine of the phase. Thus, (B) shows that despite removing the amplitude confound, the STAs looked very similar.
Figure 3—figure supplement 3. Examples of cells that are coupled to cortical gamma at contralateral movement onset and either maintain stable firing rates (top row), show a mixed response (middle right), increase (bottom right) or decrease (bottom left) their firing rates.

Figure 3—figure supplement 3.

In 64% of all recordings, the firing behaviour did not differ between contralateral and ipsilateral gripping. Grey-shaded areas indicate multiple-comparison corrected significant deviations from the baseline firing rate obtained from the whole recording using a cluster-based permutation procedure (p<0.05). Peri-stimulus time histograms were obtained by convolving the spike train with a 200 ms wide gaussian kernel (SD = 50 ms). Note that the frequency span of the gamma coupling, highlighted by black boxes, slightly varied across cells. The cells shown to the left also coupled to beta after movement offset. Also note that the remaining red areas suggest coupling in response to other task-events, for example immediately after the Left/Right cue, which, however, was less consistent across cells as it did not appear as feature in Figure 3A.
Figure 3—figure supplement 4. Additional firing rate analysse.

Figure 3—figure supplement 4.

(A) Scatter plot of STN spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling (PLV) and firing rate changes. No relationship was found between firing rate changes at movement onset and coupling strength (mean R = 0.01, p=0.969). Both measurements were computed based on 100 spikes occurring around movement onset (in a symmetrical window centred around 0.15 s after movement onset, which is the centre of the −0.1:0.4 s window used for other analyses). The number of spikes had to be held constant for all recordings to ensure that phase locking values were unbiased. If a constant window length would have been chosen instead, the phase locking values would have been biased towards higher values for firing rate decreases, resulting in a spurious relationship. (B) Firing characteristics were computed similar as in Rule et al. (2017). After the Le/Ri cue the coefficient of variation of interspike intervals (ISI CV) was reduced for contra- and ipsilateral gripping. Values were compared against the baseline activity obtained from the whole recording (horizontal dotted line) using a cluster-based permutation procedure to correct for multiple comparisons similar as for the time-frequency plots. Significant deviations from baseline are shown as shaded areas in grey. (C) No significant changes were found for the percentage of bursting (prctBurst, defined as ISI < 10 ms). (D) A drop in ISI mode (=mode of the interspike interval distribution) was observed at ipsilateral grip offset. Error bars show standard errors.
Figure 3—figure supplement 5. During ipsilateral gripping, STN spikes can be locked to gamma recorded from different cortical sites.

Figure 3—figure supplement 5.

Coupling strength is presented for two different sets of ECoG sites: One set of contacts with highest gamma PLV during contra- (A) and the other one with highest gamma PLV during ipsilateral gripping (B). The leftmost column displays the same plots as shown in Figure 2 to enable a direct comparison. (B) Significant coupling between STN spikes and cortical sites with the highest 60–80 Hz PLV during ipsilateral gripping (bottom row). Note that in these sites, coupling also occurs for contralateral grips (top row) although the gamma frequency is slightly higher as when calculated for the other set of ECoG sites shown in (A). (C) In IPSI GRIP ECoG sites, gamma power increased again significantly only during contralateral gripping relative to the median power obtained from the whole recording. Note that in response to the Left/Right cue, which announced an ipsilateral movement, beta power was significantly elevated up until the Go signal while > 60 Hz power was relatively suppressed. Significant clusters (encircled in black) were obtained with a cluster-based permutation procedure to correct for multiple comparisons (p<0.05).
Figure 3—figure supplement 5—source data 1. Source data to Figure 3—figure supplement 5 showing coupling with IPSI GRIP ECoG sites during contralateral grip trials.
Figure 3—figure supplement 5—source data 2. Source data to Figure 3—figure supplement 5 showing coupling with IPSI GRIP ECoG sites during ipsilateral grip trials.

The average firing rate at the group level did not change with any of the task events (Figure 3C). This was the case not only when computing average firing rates in 0.3 s long sliding windows as shown in Figure 3C, matching the average window length used to calculate the coupling strength, but also when examining instantaneous firing rates.

Importantly, gamma coupling could be found in recordings of all response types, irrespective of whether firing rates remained stable (47%), increased (21%) or decreased (32%) (Figure 3—figure supplement 3, cells were classified as increasing or decreasing if a significant cluster occurred between the Go cue and movement offset; some additionally showed a significant decrease either before or after the movement). We evaluated firing relationships further by computing a correlation across recordings between firing rate changes at movement onset and coupling strength, which confirmed that no relationship was present (mean R = 0.01, p=0.969, see Figure 3—figure supplement 4A). The only cue-related change in firing characteristics observed on the group level was a reduction in the interspike interval coefficient of variation (Figure 3—figure supplement 4B). In summary, these results show that spatially and temporally specific STN-spike-to-cortical-gamma coupling can be detected at the onset of contralateral movement.

We then extended our analyses to ECoG sites that showed the greatest spike-to-gamma coupling during ipsilateral gripping. In this set of sites, coupling also exceeded that obtained by a permutation distribution (Figure 3—figure supplement 5B bottom). Note that these sites were spatially more widely distributed and tended to be located posterior to motor cortex (Figure 2E right, labelled IPSI GRIP ECoG sites). In these sites, gamma coupling was also present during contralateral gripping (Figure 3—figure supplement 5B top), although the coupling frequency appears to be slightly higher than for the set of ECoG sites in which coupling was greatest for contralateral gripping. Gamma power increased and beta power decreased significantly after cluster-based permutation correction relative to the median power obtained from the whole recording only for contralateral grip trials (Figure 3—figure supplement 5C). Notably, if the initial cue indicated an ipsilateral grip, beta power was significantly elevated until the Go signal while power above 60 Hz was significantly reduced (Figure 3—figure supplement 5C). Next, we tested if the coupling strength preceding the movement onset related to reaction times.

Stronger spike-to-gamma coupling precedes faster reaction times

To test if reaction time differences were linked to differences in gamma coupling, we median-split all trials and calculated coupling strengths separately for the two subsets. This analysis revealed that faster reaction times were preceded by higher STN spike-to-primary motor cortical LFP gamma coupling and that this was specific for contralateral gripping. The difference was present already at the time of the Go signal (Figure 4A), which occurred on average 0.39 s before grip onset in fast trials and 0.69 s in trials with slow RTs. The windows for calculating PLVs spanned on average −0.16:0.16 s around each point and the precise window length at the Go signal was 306 ± 68 ms and 310 ± 75 ms for fast and slow RT trials. Thus, even in trials with short RTs, the movement onset fell outside the window used for calculating PLVs at the time of the Go signal, where a significant difference in coupling already was present (t27 = 3.2, p=0.004). Hence, the difference in coupling cannot be explained merely by earlier movements in trials with short RTs. The difference disappeared at grip onset, which shows that the coupling strength during the movement itself was comparable irrespective of whether RTs leading up to the movement were fast or slow. To further corroborate this finding, we also computed within-subjects correlations between binned coupling strengths and RTs in a 0.5 s long window starting at the Go cue. This confirmed again at the group level that RTs were significantly shorter when coupling strength was higher (mean R = −0.16, t27 = −2.5, p=0.019).

Figure 4. Coupling was significantly higher when reaction times were faster.

(A) The green cluster shows that in those trials, in which RTs were fast as defined by a median split, gamma coupling in the contralateral hemisphere was already significantly higher immediately after the Go signal, about 500 ms before movement onset. (B) Average cortical gamma power tended to be higher and pre-Go signal beta power lower in contralateral grip trials with faster reaction times, however, these differences did not survive cluster-based multiple comparison correction. See also Figure 4—figure supplements 1 and 2.

Figure 4.

Figure 4—figure supplement 1. No significant differences in firing characteristics were found when comparing trials with fast vs. slow RTs.

Figure 4—figure supplement 1.

Error bars show standard errors. FR = firing rate in Hertz, ISI CV = Coefficient of variation of interspike intervals, prctBurst = percentage of bursting (defined as ISI < 10 ms), ISI mode = mode of the interspike interval distribution.
Figure 4—figure supplement 2. Analyses related to yank and force.

Figure 4—figure supplement 2.

(A+B) Differences in coupling of STN spikes between trials that were median-split according to peak yank (A) and peak force (B). In contrast to the difference in coupling between fast and slow reaction times trials (shown in Figure 4 in the main text), no significant clusters were found. (C+D) Differences in ECoG power when trials were median-split according to peak yank (C) and peak force (D). No significant clusters were present.

No such correlation was present between RTs and firing rates (mean R = −0.02, t27 = −0.5, p=0.594) and none of the firing characteristics differed between trials with fast and slow RTs (Figure 4—figure supplement 1). When trials were split according to peak yank or peak grip force, no significant effects were found (Figure 4—figure supplement 2). Note that primary motor cortical gamma power also tended to be higher when reaction times were shorter, although the effect was not significant (Figure 4B). Finally, we also found that the RT-dependent difference in coupling was spatially specific, as it was not present in ECoG sites that showed the greatest coupling during ipsilateral gripping.

STN spiking probability is modulated relative to the cortical gamma phase

PLVs for individual pairs of STN spike and cortical ECoG recordings as a measure of coupling strength do not provide a measure of the consistency of the preferred phase across recordings. As only the length of the average phase vector is used to calculate PLVs, reflecting how strongly bundled or spread the phase values are, information about the preferred phase is lost. To find out whether, across recordings, spikes were consistently more probable at certain points of the gamma cycle and less probable at others, we investigated the spiking probability relative to the cortical gamma phase. It would be unlikely to find a consistent phase preference and significant modulation of spiking probabilities if high PLV coupling was a by-product of analysis choices (e.g., the pre-selection of ECoG contacts).

Spiking probabilities were computed within a −0.1–0.4 s window around movement onset for four non-overlapping gamma phase bins. To test whether the resulting probabilities were significantly modulated, we computed a 4 (bins) x 2 (effector side: contralateral vs. ipsilateral) ANOVA. The ANOVA resulted in a significant interaction (F3, 81 = 5.2, p=0.003) and no significant main effects (factor bins: F3, 81 = 2.4, p=0.090; factor effector side: F1, 27 = 0.1, p=0.718). Figure 5 shows that spiking probabilities were significantly and differentially modulated during contralateral (BIN2 vs. BIN4) and ipsilateral gripping (BIN1 vs. BIN2/3/4). This significant modulation shows that the preferred and non-preferred phases for spiking were relatively consistent across recordings, despite the ECoG sites used to extract the gamma phase were selected according to the highest coupling irrespective of the preferred phase.

Figure 5. STN spiking probability is modulated relative to the phase of cortical gamma.

The top plot shows how spiking probabilities during contralateral grip onset co-modulate with the gamma phase. * show FDR-corrected significant differences between phase bins. Spiking was relatively reduced in BIN4 during contralateral gripping. It was significantly lower than during ipsilateral gripping (bottom plot, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, p=0.008). The central mark of the box plots displays the median and edges show the 25th and 75th percentile. Whiskers show the 1.5*interquartile range and outliers (red crosses) are data points beyond this range. See also Figure 5—figure supplements 14.

Figure 5.

Figure 5—figure supplement 1. Description of the rationale behind the polarity flipping procedure.

Figure 5—figure supplement 1.

Figure 5—figure supplement 2. Polarity standardization procedure.

Figure 5—figure supplement 2.

Whether we see a trough or instead a peak in the gamma signal depends on the order of subtraction of two neighbouring contacts when calculating the bipolar configuration. To ensure that the polarity is consistent across all recordings, cortical high-frequency activity (HFA = rectified > 300 Hz, black line) was used as flipping criterion, as this signal is independent of the order of subtraction and relative location of the source. If the HFA close to the borders of the plot (close to –pi and pi) was higher than in the HFA in the centre (Example 3 + 4), the phase was flipped.
Figure 5—figure supplement 3. Similar analyses as in Figure 5 based on the same ECoG sites but with five instead of four phase bins.

Figure 5—figure supplement 3.

The 5 (bins) x 2 (contra- and ipsilateral gripping) ANOVA showed a significant main effect of bin (F3.8, 102 = 3.5, p=0.012). * show FDR-corrected significant differences between phase bins within contralateral (top) and ipsilateral (bottom) grip trials. The ANOVA showed no significant main effect of effector side (F1, 27 = 12.6, p=0.374) or interaction (F3.5, 95.6 = 1.7, p=0.162). The central mark of the box plots displays the median and edges show the 25th and 75th percentile. Whiskers show the 1.5*interquartile range and outliers (red crosses) are data points beyond this range.
Figure 5—figure supplement 4. Similar analyses as in Figure 5 but based on gamma obtained from the set of ECoG sites that showed the strongest coupling during ipsilateral gripping.

Figure 5—figure supplement 4.

The 4 (bins) x 2 (contra- and ipsilateral gripping) ANOVA was not significant (main effect bins: F3, 81 = 0.6, p=0.586; main effect effector side: F1, 27 = 0.1, p=0.787, interaction: F3, 81 = 1.2, p=0.330). The central mark of the box plots displays the median and edges show the 25th and 75th percentile. Whiskers show the 1.5*interquartile range and outliers (red crosses) are data points beyond this range.

The spiking probability in BIN4 was significantly lower during contralateral compared to ipsilateral gripping (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, n = 28, p=0.008) and the probability in BIN1 was higher (t27 = 2.5, p=0.021, not significant if corrected for the four multiple comparisons). Increasing the number of bins to five instead of four resulted in a similar significant modulation within contra- and ipsilateral grip trials (Figure 5—figure supplement 3), however, none of the bins showed a significant difference between contra- and ipsilateral gripping with this subdivision. Only the ANOVA or the pairwise comparisons for gamma obtained from primary motor cortical ECoG sites were significant. Spiking probabilities for gamma obtained from the other set of sites (with highest coupling during ipsilateral gripping) are shown in Figure 5—figure supplement 4.

This distinct modulation of spiking probability according to the phase of gamma is remarkable and may provide a mechanism that enhances cortical gamma oscillations, which were more pronounced during contralateral gripping (Figure 3). If STN spikes that occur at one phase of the cortical gamma cycle contribute to boosting cortical gamma for contralateral movements, then during ipsilateral movements unintentional boosting of gamma could be avoided if spikes would occur at the opposite phase (i.e. 180° apart). The following section will quantify if such a systematic difference in spike timing was present. This analysis was also motivated by the above reported differences in spiking probabilities between contra- and ipsilateral gripping observed at a specific phase of the gamma cycle.

The preferred gamma phase of STN spikes differs between contra- and ipsilateral movements

To test if the timing of STN spikes relative to the cortical gamma phase systematically differed between contra- and ipsilateral grip trials, we extracted the gamma phase from the primary motor cortical ECoG sites and computed the average, or ‘preferred’, phase coinciding with STN spikes for both trial types. To exclude recordings where estimation of the average phase estimate may have been unreliable, we started conservatively by using only recordings in which gamma coupling was significant at movement onset (shown in Figure 2F). We found in this subset (n = 11) that the preferred gamma phase differed significantly between contra- and ipsilateral grip trials by ~ 210° (mean offset −2.6 rad, 95% CI = [−3.9,–1.4], Figure 6A). A more relaxed selection included all recordings in which the pairwise phase consistency value (a measure of unbiased coupling strength) exceeded zero (see Methods). In the larger set (n = 23), which is potentially more representative although individual phase estimates may be noisier, the preferred phase was offset by approximately 180° (Figure 6B, mean offset 3.1 rad, 95% CI = [2.1, 4.0]). P-values derived from a V-test assessing directionality towards an offset of 180° showed that, as expected, the significant phase difference was only present around movement onset (Figure 6C), where coupling was strongest. This analysis thus confirmed that spikes preferentially locked to approximately opposite points of the gamma cycle depending on whether the selected motor response was contralateral or ipsilateral to the recorded hemisphere.

Figure 6. Systematic offset of STN spike timing relative to cortical gamma between contra- and ipsilateral gripping.

Figure 6.

(A) STN spikes of recordings with significant gamma coupling (n = 11 units from seven patients [n = 6: one unit, n = 1: five units]) coincided with cortical gamma phases that were on average nearly opposite when comparing contra- and ipsilateral gripping (mean offset = −2.6 rad, 95% CI = [−3.9,–1.4]). (B) When including more recordings (all recordings where PPC > 0, n = 23 from 12 patients [n = 7: one unit, n = 1: two units, n = 3: three units, n = 1: five units]), the offset was very close to 180° (mean offset = 3.1 rad, 95% CI = [2.1, 4.0]). The gamma phase was extracted from ECoG sites that showed the highest coupling during contralateral gripping, as also used for Figures 35. (C) P-values derived from a V-test assessing directionality towards an offset of 180° (n = 23) show that the effect of the offset is strongest in a 500 ms sliding window centred around 0.15 s after movement onset, i.e. in a window −0.1–0.4 s around movement onset.

Discussion

We performed simultaneous recordings of STN unit activity and electrocorticography during DBS surgery while subjects performed a hand grip task. We found that enhanced STN spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling preceded faster RTs already at the time of the Go cue, suggesting a role for subcortico-cortical coupling in preparing movement. This effect was spatially specific to ECoG sites that were predominantly located over primary motor cortical areas. Importantly, we found no correlations between reaction times and firing rates in the same time window, indicating that the timing of neuronal discharges with respect to cortical gamma phase was more predictive of movement than firing rates. Table 1 shows an overview of the set of questions on STN spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling that we covered in this study.

Table 1. Questions addressed by STN spike-to-cortical gamma phase coupling analyses.

Figure Question Finding
Figure 2: Is it most pronounced over motor cortex? Yes
Figure 3A: Is it frequency- and time-specific? Yes
Figure 3C: Is the average firing rate across all units significantly modulated? No
Figure 4: Are faster reaction times linked to stronger coupling? Yes
Figure 5: Is the probability of spikes significantly modulated relative to the cortical gamma phase
during contra- and ipsilateral gripping? Yes
Figure 6: Do we find a systematic phase offset of the average timing of STN spikes relative
to the cortical gamma phase between contra- and ipsilateral gripping? Yes

We also showed that STN spiking probability was significantly modulated when binned with respect to the gamma cycle. This is a strict test of the temporal consistency of coupling across recordings because it considers the bin preferences of each of the recorded spike trains.

The STN receives widespread glutamatergic cortical inputs and has reciprocal connections with the GABAergic globus pallidus externus (GPe) (Albin et al., 1989). This reciprocal connectivity may in itself be able to generate, boost or sustain rhythmic activity (Blenkinsop et al., 2017). Considering that STN activity strongly affects the thalamus by exciting the inhibitory basal ganglia output nuclei (GPi/SNr), gamma-rhythmic STN firing could enhance cortical gamma oscillations by switching the GPi from a tonic inhibitory mode to an oscillating mode with brief periods of silence that then disinhibit the thalamus. Note that in the present study, we could not determine whether coupling and local gamma synchrony originated within the basal ganglia or in cortex, which directly projects to the STN via the hyperdirect pathway. Although previous studies suggest that STN gamma activity drives that in cortex (Williams et al., 2002; Litvak et al., 2012; Sharott et al., 2018), coupling may well occur through transient cortico-STN-cortical network effects.

Importantly, average STN firing rates across all recordings showed no consistent task-related change. We only found an increase in the regularity of spike timing, which was expressed as decrease in interspike interval variability after the preparatory cue and in ipsilateral trials even during gripping. Rhythmicity of spiking itself at this fast temporal scale and in short windows can be hard to detect in individual cells with autocorrelation measures because sparse spiking makes it difficult to capture a clear oscillatory structure.

Further support for the hypothesis that the relative timing of STN spikes matters for selectively executing contra- or ipsilateral actions was provided by our finding that the average gamma phase that coincided with STN spikes was systematically offset between contra- and ipsilateral gripping: During ipsilateral gripping, the timing of STN spikes was shifted by ~ 180° relative to the preferred phase during contralateral gripping. The preferred phases thus were located at approximately opposite points of the gamma cycle. Presuming that the gamma cycle captures alternating phases of relative depolarisation and hyperpolarisation of a large number of cortical cells, this may be a mechanism to dynamically modify the functional consequences of STN spikes. Neurons in the GPi receive excitatory afferents from the STN but also inhibitory afferents from the GPe (Smith et al., 1994) and the striatum (Albin et al., 1989), which is also under direct cortical influence and may thus also be gamma-entrained. Depending on the timing of converging cortical activity coming through the STN and the striatum, gamma synchrony in the basal ganglia could be enhanced or suppressed. For instance, if STN spikes are focussed within brief windows, strong inhibitory striatal inputs may coincide with them in the GPi and thus diminish the overall excitatory drive of the STN, even if STN spike rates remain the same. Reduced GPi firing could then promote thalamic and cortical facilitation – correlates of which we saw as an increase in HFA during contralateral gripping. Conversely, during ipsilateral gripping, if the relative timing of STN spikes is offset by ~ 180°, these spikes may drive GPi cells outside of periods of incoming inhibition. This drive could maintain GPi firing and thus maintain tonic inhibition of the thalamus as would be appropriate when initiating ipsilateral movements. Also at the level of the thalamus, the relative timing of incoming activity should matter substantially as it integrates excitatory cortical and inhibitory basal ganglia inputs (Goldberg and Fee, 2012). All of these speculations would be tested ideally in future studies with simultaneous recordings in the relevant sites.

Although many specifics of the present results are unique, recent publications support the general idea that shifts in the relative timing of neuronal activity in different sites of the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop may have a strong influence on the function of the circuit (Goldberg and Fee, 2012; Jantz et al., 2017). Precise temporal patterning of STN spikes could also provide a key mechanism to avoid co-activation of cells that may otherwise activate competing effectors during movement. Losing control over the mechanisms that enable precise temporal structuring of activity might therefore lead to uncontrolled movements as seen in Huntington’s disease or levodopa-induced dyskinesia.

Because ECoG signals tend to show a very broad movement-related power increase between 50–200 Hz, past research has primarily focussed on the coupling of spikes to the amplitude of 50–200 Hz activity (Shimamoto et al., 2013; Lipski et al., 2017b), which captures aspects of neural activity that are separate from the narrow-band gamma phase. The movement-related increase in ECoG power in our data also spanned a very broad frequency range from 60 to 150 Hz. It is widely acknowledged that ECoG activity in this range can contain both true oscillatory components but also broadband activity that is devoid of rhythmicity (Ray and Maunsell, 2011; Bonnefond et al., 2017). Distinguishing the two is difficult, because true synchronization between distinct sites can be present even despite the absence of a clear peak in the power spectrum (Vinck et al., 2013; Brunet et al., 2014). In our data, we assume that the broadband power increase originated partly due to increased neural activity, including postsynaptic potentials and action potentials, but that the phase of the 60–80 Hz filtered signal is still meaningful, because discrete spectral peaks in this band have been reported in MEG recordings of healthy participants and patients with PD, demonstrating the presence of pronounced neural synchrony (Litvak et al., 2012; Cheyne et al., 2008). Note that in ECoG sites that were further away from the presumed hand region of primary motor cortex, the relative contribution of broadband neural activity may be larger and the oscillatory component may be weaker. Our choice of extracting the 60–80 Hz phase also appears valid when considering the clear co-modulation of the amplitude of high-frequency activity with the 60–80 Hz filtered signal. The phase of 60–80 Hz gamma activity thus seems to reflect when synaptic inputs arrive in volleys that may then trigger action potentials captured as high-frequency activity (Fries et al., 2007; Buzsáki et al., 2012). As expected, we found that cortical HFA was higher during contralateral gripping.

We also observed that the same cells that dynamically locked to gamma activity can likewise lock to beta oscillations after movement completion. A rebound of post-movement beta oscillations has been associated with evaluation of a movement outcome. When feedback is as expected, the beta rebound is known to be high (Tan et al., 2014; Tan et al., 2016; Torrecillos et al., 2015). High spike coupling to beta thus may consolidate the previous movement or bias against adaptation of the next motor response, although this remains to be tested. In this regard it is also interesting that if the initial cue indicated an ipsilateral grip, pre-movement cortical beta power was significantly elevated throughout the pre-Go signal delay period, consistent with an overall anti-kinetic influence on contralateral output units prior to ipsilateral gripping. The variability of interspike intervals simultaneously decreased. Our findings support the emerging picture of two (although there may be more) distinct rhythms, the beta and the gamma rhythm, that can entrain neuronal spikes at different stages of motor control to facilitate or restrict motor output. In this light, gamma oscillations may reflect processing that is necessary for a change in motor state, such as the start of a movement or sudden cessation (Fischer et al., 2017). The exact downstream consequences of STN spike coupling to different rhythms remain to be investigated with multi-site recordings in strictly controlled motor tasks.

Differences in gamma coupling were linked to fluctuations in reaction times, but not in movement velocity or force. This seems at first surprising as local STN gamma power has been shown to correlate with movement velocity (Joundi et al., 2012; Lofredi et al., 2018) and force (Tan et al., 2013; Alhourani et al., 2018). However, our task was not designed to capture a wide range of grip onset velocities or force levels and patients were studied during dopamine withdrawal, which reduces velocity-related gamma modulation (Lofredi et al., 2018). Because patients were not pressed to move as fast as possible, reaction times varied considerably, which allowed us to examine how coupling strength differed despite not specifically manipulating motor preparation experimentally. A similar relationship, but at an across-subjects correlation level, between faster reaction times and enhanced STN LFP-to-motor cortex gamma coupling was recently reported in a dataset with overlapping subjects (Alhourani et al., 2018). This study also reported a positive correlation between local STN gamma activity and the peak force. Local STN synchrony thus seems to be a stronger correlate of movement vigour than long-range STN spike-to-cortical gamma synchrony.

Note that because coupling strength varies strongly with the nature of the captured units, and thus different units recorded from one patient can result in variable coupling values, we did not perform correlations between coupling strength and disease severity. To meaningfully compute such correlations, the number of cells sampled from each patient would need to be large enough to compute a reliable mean coupling score.

Our study is limited in that ECoG coverage was not the same across patients and spanned limited areas of the cortical surface. However, we were able to perform group analyses by focussing on two sets of sites that showed the highest gamma coupling with contralateral and ipsilateral gripping. We found spatially specific effects, such as the difference in coupling depending on reaction times and the phase-dependent spiking probability modulation. These contrasts were unrelated to and did not depend on the ECoG contact pre-selection criterion and hence confirm that the selection procedure resulted in a physiologically relevant subset of ECoG sites involved in motor processing. The sites showing the highest gamma coupling during contralateral gripping were predominantly located precentral, in an area of motor cortex that seems to be involved in the control of upper limb movements (Cheyne et al., 2008). One site was located in lateral parietal area 5, which is also associated with direct corticospinal control of hand movements (Rathelot et al., 2017) and we cannot exclude that coupling may also be present between STN spikes and other cortical sites that were not recorded. We acknowledge that electrode localizations were determined indirectly, as our intraoperative imaging modality was two dimensional, however our two-dimensional to three-dimensional fusion technique previously was shown to localize ECoG recording locations with high functional-anatomic accuracy (Randazzo et al., 2016). Another caveat in this study is that firing rates in the STN were obtained from Parkinson’s disease patients. Firing rates in patients at rest increase on average as the disease progresses (Remple et al., 2011). Whether our findings translate to neurologically healthy motor networks remains to be tested, although kinematics during task performance did not differ from those of subjects without a movement disorder (Kondylis et al., 2016). Note that according to the hemibody upper limb UPDRS scores reported in Table 2, symptom severity was on average worse on the ipsilateral side, which could also contribute to the difference seen between contralateral and ipsilateral gripping. The coupling that we observed also may be less specific than in healthy brains considering that progressive cell death in Parkinson’s disease has been associated with a loss of effector-specific activity (Bronfeld and Bar-Gad, 2011). Note that we included both single- and multi-unit recordings in the analysis. Considering that multiple cells need to be recruited in rhythmic firing to cause any downstream effects, inclusion of multi-unit recordings may even be beneficial when investigating spike-to-gamma phase coupling. Finally, our results are correlative, and we cannot infer whether any electrophysiological correlates were actually causal for an observed behaviour, such as faster reaction times.

Table 2. Clinical details.

Age is given in years, M/F = male/female, MMSE = Mini Mental State Exam for neurocognition, UPDRS = Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale, contra = contralateral, ipsi = ipsilateral, RAM = rapid alternating movements of the hands, Recorded HS = Recorded Hemisphere, NR = value was not recorded in the medical record.

MMSE Tremor Rest tremor Postural tremor of hands Finger tapping Hand movement RAM Total Nr. of units: contralateral +
Age Sex Score Dominant R L R L R L R L R L UPDRS Handedness Recorded HS Higher UPDRS Ipsilateral grip trials
69 F 29 No 0 2 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 31 left left+right contra+ipsi n = 2: 31, 27
54 F 29 NR NR NR NR NR NR NR NR NR NR NR NR right left+right NR n = 3: 43, 42
68 M 29 No 0 1 0 1 2 3 2 3 1 3 42 right left ipsi n = 1: 10, 16
66 M 30 Yes 3 3 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 62 right left+right equal n = 3, 68, 81
71 M 30 No 2 0 0 0 3 2 3 3 3 3 55 right left+right contra+ipsi n = 3: 61, 58
65 F 26 No 0 1 1 1 2 4 2 3 2 2 54 NR left ipsi n = 5: 96, 63
45 M 29 Yes 3 3 4 4 0 1 0 1 0 1 31 right left ipsi n = 1: 12, 12
60 M 29 No 2 3 1 1 2 3 2 2 2 2 52 right left ipsi n = 2: 42, 50
54 M 39 No 1 0 0 0 2 2 2 2 3 3 33 right left contra n = 1: 15, 13
68 M NR No 0 0 2 2 2 3 2 2 2 3 48 right left ipsi n = 1: 12, 11
52 M NR No 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 27 right left+right equal n = 5: 113, 112
60 M 30 Yes 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 28 right right contra n = 1: 16, 16

Taken together, our work provides intriguing evidence for the idea that the temporal structure of activity travelling through the basal ganglia is important for flexible motor control. Further investigation of information routing principles with multi-site recordings in the basal ganglia in simple movement tasks may provide essential new insights about basic mechanisms of neural communication for movement initiation. Such insights could possibly transform our ability to improve treatments for basal ganglia disorders and our understanding of adaptive motor control.

Materials and methods

Subject details

A subset of the data recorded for this study was previously published elsewhere (Lipski et al., 2017b). 12 Parkinson’s disease patients performed a visually cued hand gripping task while undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery after overnight withdrawal from or a reduced dose of their dopaminergic medication. They provided written, informed consent in accordance with a protocol approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pittsburgh (IRB Protocol no. PRO13110420). Demographic details are reported in Table 2.

Method details

Task

The behavioural task was previously described (Kondylis et al., 2016; Lipski et al., 2017b). Patients had to perform unimanual left- or right-hand grip movements for at least 100 ms with at least 10% of their previously determined maximal grip force. Considering that patients were currently undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery, they were not incentivised to respond as quickly as they could. Only trials with RTs longer than two seconds were treated as invalid. A single trial started with a yellow traffic light and an instructional cue either to the left or the right of it on a screen (Figure 1). The cue instructed participants whether to grip with the left or right hand. After a random interval ranging between 1–2 s, the yellow light disappeared and a green or a red light came on. The green light instructed the patients to move and the red light served as NOGO cue and instructed patients to withhold the movement. The number of NOGO trials was variable across patients and not all patients performed a sufficient number of NOGO trials, thus NOGO trials were not analysed. The Go signal was presented on average 1.5 ± 0.4 s after the instructional cue. After trial completion, visual feedback was provided in the form of ‘You won $10’ (or in a subset of patients ‘You won $1’) if the movement was performed correctly or ‘No Gain’ if it was performed incorrectly to keep patients engaged. The feedback was presented 1.9 ± 0.4 s after the Go signal and on average 0.43 ± 0.41 s after the grip was released. The average interval between the feedback and the next instructional cue was 1.4 ± 0.3 s (variable interval between 1–2 s), so that on average every 4.7s ± 1.2s a new trial started.

Electrophysiological recordings

STN microelectrode recordings were obtained with single glass-insulated platinum-iridium microelectrodes (FHC, Bowdoin ME) with impedances between 0.3 and 0.9 MΩ. Signals were filtered and amplified using the Guideline 4000 LP+ system (FHC; 125 Hz–20 kHz) and digitized at 30 kHz using the Grapevine Neural Interface System (NIPS; Ripple, Salt Lake City, UT). In one subject, the recordings were carried out using the Neuro-Omega recording system (Alpha Omega, Alpharetta, GA) using Parylene-insulated tungsten microelectrodes. Electrocorticography (ECoG) data were concurrently recorded with subdural strip electrodes placed temporarily via the existing burr hole used for DBS lead placement. The strips consisted of either 1 × 4, 1 × 6, or 1 × 8 (n = 11 patients; 2.3 mm exposed electrode diameter, 10 mm interelectrode distance) or a 2 × 14 [n = 1 patient; 1.2 mm exposed electrode diameter, 4 mm interelectrode distance; high-density (HD) contacts] platinum-iridium contacts (Ad-Tech Medical Instrument). ECoG signals were amplified, online notch filtered (at 60, 120, and 180 Hz, 2nd order Butterworth filter), online bandpass filtered (0.3–250 Hz, 4th order Butterworth filter) and digitized at 1,000 Hz using the Grapevine NIPS. In addition to the down-sampled data, a broadband version of the data was also recorded at 30 kHz (low-pass filtered with a 3rd order Butterworth anti-aliasing filter at 7500 Hz), which was used for analyses of 300 Hz high-pass filtered high-frequency activity.

Data pre-processing

All analyses apart from the spike sorting were done in MATLAB (v. 2014b, The MathWorks Inc, Natick, Massachusetts, RRID:SCR_001622). Trials containing artefacts in the ECoG signal were removed after visual inspection, and only recordings with at least eight contralateral grip trials were included. This resulted in 28 recordings (12 single-unit recordings + 16 multi-unit recording) from 12 patients and an average number of 19 ± (SD) 8 contralateral and 18 ± (SD) nine ipsilateral grip trials. The number of units included per patient ranged between 1 and 5 (n = 5: one unit, n = 2: two units, n = 3: three units, n = 2: five units). If subsets of recordings were analysed, then the numbers on the relative contributions are reported in the figure caption.

Spike sorting

The spike sorting procedure was described in detail elsewhere (Lipski et al., 2017a). Single- and multi-unit action potentials were identified offline using principal component analysis (Plexon, Dallas,TX). A cluster qualified as a single unit (SU) if: (1) the principal component cluster was clearly separated from other clusters associated with background activity and other units, (2) if it contained spike waveforms with a unimodal distribution in principal component space, and (3) if the inter-spike interval distribution showed a refractory period of at least 3 ms (Starr et al., 2003; Schrock et al., 2009). For some SU recordings, the location of the principal component cluster drifted gradually, presumably due to a shift in distance between the electrode and the neuron caused by movement of the brain. Other recordings were classified as multi-unit (MU) recordings. In these, the principle components cluster seemed to include waveforms from multiple units, forming multimodal principal component distributions that could not be clearly separated, or that failed to meet the criterion of having a refractory period of 3 ms.

Quantification and statistical analysis

Time-frequency decomposition

Time-varying power and phase were obtained by band-pass filtering the data using Butterworth filters (4th order, two-pass, using fieldtrip functions_ft_preproc_lowpassfilter and ft_preproc_highpassfilter Oostenveld et al., 2011) and calculating the Hilbert transform. The time-frequency plots include the following frequency bins: 5–8 Hz for theta, 8–12 Hz for alpha, 12–20 Hz for low beta, 20–30 Hz for high beta followed by centre frequencies ranging from 40 to 150 Hz with a bin width of 20 Hz (incrementing by 10 Hz).

Event-related analyses of phase-coupling

Phase locking values (PLV) can be obtained by calculating the length of the average of vectors, with each vector having a length of one on a unit circle and an angle corresponding to the ECoG phase (ϕ) coinciding with each STN spike (Lachaux et al., 2000). It was calculated as follows (n = number of spikes, ϕt = ECoG phase at the time of one spike):

PLV=|t=1nei(ϕt)n|

PLVs are bounded between 0 and 1, indicating zero or perfect phase coupling respectively. One important issue when calculating PLVs is that they are inflated when sample sizes are small. To correct for differences in sample size, the pairwise phase consistency (PPC) can be used instead as an unbiased estimator when a sufficiently large (>50) sample is available (Vinck et al., 2010; Aydore et al., 2013):

PPC=nn-1(PLV2-1n)

The PPC can attain negative values, because in the absence of phase locking, the expected PPC value for infinite amounts of data is zero, and the actual PPC values for limited amounts of data distribute around zero. Recordings with negative PPC values were excluded for analyses investigating phase offsets between contra- and ipsilateral grip trials as described below.

The fact that the firing rate of some cells increased or decreased around movement or cue onsets has important implications: If we would choose a fixed window size for calculating the PLV or PPC, we would base our analysis on variable and sometimes low numbers of spikes. Variable spike numbers would results in variable biases of the PLV metric, and low spike numbers in noisy estimates of the PPC metric. Another challenge was that some patients had substantially slower reaction times or longer grip durations than others because in the intraoperative setting, task constraints were not very strict.

To get comparable estimates of the coupling strength around each of the key trial events, we implemented the following custom-written event-locked variable-window width PLV estimation procedure: First, each interval between neighbouring task events was subdivided into eight equidistant points (including the events) resulting in 29 time points for each trial (because the last point of an interval was identical to the first point of the next interval the points were concatenated the following way: [1-8, 2-8, 2-8, 2-8]). We had four intervals in total (Right/Left Cue to Go Cue, Go Cue to Grip Onset, Grip Onset to Grip Offset, Grip Offset until the end of a 0.4 s long post-movement window). The first time point of each trial was set at the onset of the Right/Left Cue and the final one at 0.4 s after the grip offset. This procedure ensures that a given plot shows unbiased estimates of the coupling strength around all key task events and not just for one single event, which would be the case if it was locked only to movement or cue onsets.

To include the same number of spikes around each time point, and thus avoid fluctuations of the PLV just because of differences in sample size, the windows centred around each time point were scaled in width. Separately for each recording, the target spike number was set to the average number of spikes occurring within a 0.3 s window (obtained by summing up all spikes across all trials, dividing by the total trial length and multiplying by 0.3 s). If this number was below 50, it was set to 50 to avoid very small and thus less representative samples. Each window was placed symmetrically around each time point and its width was set such that the sum of spikes across all trials would match the target number as closely as possible (Figure 3—figure supplement 1). This procedure allowed an unbiased comparison of coupling over time despite changes in firing rate that occurred in some recordings. The average window size was 0.32 ± (SD) 0.04 s (min.: 0.16 s, max.: 0.75 s). Note that the procedure did not ensure that the number of spikes was the same across subjects. Ensuring this would have required an even larger variability of window widths. The average number of spikes per window was 171 ± (SD) 121 spikes. However, our main results hold both for PLV and PPC values, with the latter eliminating biases resulting from different sample sizes.

Each matrix was composed of 16 frequency bins and 29 time points. The resulting 28 matrices (one for each of the 28 recordings) were event-locked to all four task events and could thus be easily averaged across recordings despite differences in reaction times or grip duration. The coarsely sampled matrices were smoothed using the MATLAB function interp2 with an interpolation factor of 2 resulting in a grid with a resolution of 61 * 113. Finally, the time-dimension was resized using the MATLAB function imresize to rescale the inter-event intervals to the average recorded durations.

Firing characteristics

Firing rates were calculated within a 300 ms window around each time point to get a time-evolving estimate. Three additional firing characteristics were calculated similar as in Rule et al. (2017): The interspike interval coefficient of variation (ISI CV), the percentage of bursting (%burst) and the mode of the ISI (ISI mode). Because properties such as the coefficient of variation (CV) can again be biased by small sample sizes and to enable a direct comparison, we used the same window widths to calculate time-evolving firing characteristics as outlined above for calculating the time-evolving PLV. A robust version of the ISI CV was calculated as the median absolute deviation of all ISIs divided by the median and multiplied by 100. The %burst metric was defined as the percentage of all ISIs shorter than 10 ms. To calculate the ISI mode, we first excluded all bursts, and then computed a probability density estimate (using the MATLAB function ksdensity) of which the mode was extracted. The baseline firing characteristics that were used to test for significant deviations were computed by splitting the whole recording into segments with the same number of spikes as were included when computing it across trials or into 300 ms long segments for computing the baseline firing rates. To get a robust estimate of individual baseline values, the median of all segments was computed for each individual recording. The 28 recordings were also assessed individually with cluster-based permutation tests as shown for the peri-stimulus time histograms in Figure 3—figure supplement 3. Cells were classified as increasing or decreasing their firing rates if a significant cluster occurred between the Go cue and the movement offset.

ECoG contact position normalization to MNI space

The temporarily placed subdural ECoG strips were localized by aligning intraoperative fluoroscopy (x-ray) images of the strip to co-registered preoperative MRI and postoperative CT scans (Randazzo et al., 2016). In brief, preoperative MRI scans were co-registered to postoperative CT using SPM (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/software/spm12/) and consecutively decomposed as 3D skull and brain surfaces using Freesurfer (Dale et al., 1999; https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/). The reconstructions were then co-registered to common landmarks visible in the intraoperative fluoroscopy images (stereotactic frame pins, implanted DBS electrodes and skull outline). The parallax effect of the fluoroscopic images was accounted for by using the measured distance from the radiation source to the subject’s skull to adjust the projection of the skull/brain surfaces. Three-dimensional coordinates of ECoG recording sites were obtained in native Freesurfer space, based on the alignment of the ECoG strip in the fluoroscopic image to the cortical surface reconstruction. To allow group analysis, the electrode locations were then transformed to ICBM152 population averaged cortex space using population-based normalization of the native surface reconstructions (Saad and Reynolds, 2012).

ECoG contact selection

To get a local estimate of the cortical power and phase, we computed bipolar configurations by subtracting neighbouring ECoG contacts resulting in n-1 bipolar channels if n contacts were recorded. For each spike recording, the ECoG contact with the highest PLV between 60–80 Hz and within −0.1–0.4 s around movement onset during contralateral gripping was pre-selected for further analyses. 60–80 Hz was chosen, as previous research has shown coherence between STN LFP and cortical oscillations in this frequency band (Williams et al., 2002; Litvak et al., 2012). We also performed the same selection procedure to find a separate set of ECoG contacts showing the highest coupling during ipsilateral gripping, which was used to perform control analyses. Figure 2—figure supplement 1 shows the topographic distribution of coupling strength in one example recording during contra- and ipsilateral gripping.

Topography of gamma coupling and power

In the topoplots of movement-related gamma and beta power changes, the average across all contacts was displayed. Relative power from a −0.1–0.4 s window around grip onsets was normalized by the average power from the same contact across the whole recording. All points of the cortical mesh within a 4 mm radius (to increase spatial specificity when including all contacts) from the corresponding ECoG site were coloured uniformly with the corresponding value and then averaged.

To illustrate the cortical distribution of gamma coupling during contra- and ipsilateral gripping, we displayed the two sets of ECoG sites with highest gamma coupling during contralateral gripping as well as during ipsilateral gripping. We also show the distribution of the subset of contacts displaying significant movement-related spike-to-60–80 Hz gamma coupling in the same window. Significance was assessed again by creating permutation distributions. To pass the test, two conditions had to be met: First, the original PPC should be significantly higher than the null-distribution created by randomly permuting the ECoG LFP-to-STN spike association 500 times across trials. With this method, the pattern of spikes and the more pronounced gamma synchrony in the ECoG LFP at movement onset remains intact. Second, the original PPC should be significantly higher around movement onset compared to a pre-movement period (spikes were drawn from a window ranging from −3 to −2 s before movement onset and matched in the number of spikes) from where spikes and coincident ECoG phases were extracted. We applied one-sided tests (α = 0.1, but both conditions had to be significant) such that a larger number of contacts, which is more representative of the overall distribution, was displayed in the topoplot. Cortical mesh areas within a 7 mm radius around each bipolar contact site (defined as the average location between the two contacts used for the bipolar calculation) were displayed as significant to ensure good visibility of each single contact.

Cluster-based permutation procedure

Significance tests in plots showing multiple time- or frequency points were performed using a cluster-based permutation procedure for multiple-comparison correction (Maris and Oostenveld, 2007). Condition labels of the original samples (e.g. median-split fast or slow RTs) were randomly permuted 1000 times such that for each recording the order of subtraction can change. When firing rates in individual recordings were compared relative to a baseline period (ranging from −0.5 s before the Left/Right cue to the Go signal), the normalized firing rate was compared against 0 by flipping the sign of the firing rates of a subset of randomly chosen trials. This permutation procedure results in a null-hypothesis distribution of 1000 differences. Suprathreshold-clusters (pre-cluster threshold: p<0.05) were obtained for the original unpermuted data and for each permutation sample by computing the z-scores relative to the permutation distribution. If the absolute sum of the z-scores within the original suprathreshold-clusters exceeded the 95th percentile of the 1000 largest absolute sums of z-scores from the permutation distribution, it was considered statistically significant.

To test if PLVs were significantly elevated, we created a permutation distribution by shuffling the LFP-to-spike relationship in each recording 500 times. The same windows were chosen as for the calculation of the original PLVs but the trial-association between the ECoG LFP and STN spikes was permuted such that, for example, the spike train from trial one was paired with the LFP from trial 4, resulting in phases that could have been observed by chance if no spike-to-phase coupling existed. Importantly, the same shuffling was applied to all time- and frequency points within each of the 500 permutations. If different randomizations were applied for each time- or frequency point, the natural appearance of clusters would be prevented, and the test, which is again based on the z-scores of the largest suprathreshold clusters as above, would not be sufficiently conservative.

Whenever time-frequency plots were compared between contra- and ipsilateral grip trials, the cluster-based permutation procedure was performed on the differences (e.g. between PLVs during fast vs. slow RTs or between original PLVs and shuffled PLVs).

Correlation between coupling strength following the Go cue and RTs

To test for a relationship between coupling strength and RTs, Pearson’s correlation coefficients were computed for each recording as follows: Trials were sorted according to their RTs. All spikes within a 0.5 s window just after the Go cue were ordered accordingly, and their corresponding cortical gamma phases were determined. The resulting array of spike-LFP gamma phases was then subdivided into seven non-overlapping bins that contained an equal number of spikes to compute one PLV for each bin. The average RT for each bin was obtained by taking the mean of the RTs corresponding to each of the included spikes. Correlation coefficients were computed based on these seven bins, Fisher’s Z-transformed and subjected to a t-test to assess if they significantly differed from zero on the group level.

Phase-dependent spiking probability and polarity flipping according to local high-frequency activity

Average PLVs can be high across recordings although the average preferred phase could differ from recording to recording. When computing the PLV, the information of preferred phase is not retained as only the vector length of the average phase vector is taken into account, reflecting how strongly bundled or spread the phase values are. To test whether spikes were consistently more probable at certain phases and less probable at others, we computed the spiking probability in four non-overlapping phase bins across the evolving gamma cycles. An issue that needs to be dealt with beforehand is that the phase of the cortical oscillation can be polarity-reversed depending on the order of subtraction of the two channels for the bipolar configuration and the location and orientation of the gamma-generating source. If the order of subtraction of two channels would be flipped, then the peaks of the oscillation would turn into the troughs, and the troughs into peaks. Group statistics of spiking probabilities across all recordings can thus only be meaningfully computed after standardizing the polarity. To perform an automatized polarity-standardization procedure, we took into account that gamma oscillations can capture fluctuations in local excitability and computed the local high-frequency activity (HFA) as a proxy of background unit activity. This was performed on the ECoG data sampled at 30 kHz, which was recorded without any online filters. The HFA was computed by high-pass filtering the ECoG signal at 300 Hz, full-wave rectifying and low-pass filtering with a cut-off of 100 Hz. This is a commonly used procedure (e.g. Eckhorn et al., 1988; Pooresmaeili et al., 2010) with the cutoff of 300 Hz considered a good threshold to obtain an estimate of multi-unit activity (Logothetis, 2003) as the energy of spike waveforms is in that frequency range, although its precise value is not critical. Using a cutoff of 300 Hz made sure that we could detect fast fluctuations of activity. This would have been more difficult if a cutoff in the vicinity of 60–80 Hz were used because the signal would then likely be dominated by slower fluctuations in lower frequencies. A 150 Hz high-pass filter, or alternatively computing the amplitude of the analytic signal instead of full-wave rectification, provided the same results. The low-pass filtering results in a smoother version of the >300 Hz rectified signal, reducing fast fluctuations and resulting in a smoother co-modulation of the HFA with the peaks and troughs of the evolving 60–80 Hz gamma signal. Importantly, increases in background unit activity close to the recording sites, i.e. detecting when > 300 Hz amplitude is increased, are invariant to the order of subtraction of the two neighbouring ECoG contacts that is performed to initially compute the bipolar signal (see Figure 5—figure supplement 1). Hence the HFA is an ideal feature to standardize the polarity of the bipolar signal across all recordings. Next, we extracted the 60–80 Hz gamma phase from the same signal (which was offline notch-filtered) and subdivided it into 126 equally spaced, non-overlapping phase bins with a bin width of 0.05π. For each bin, the average HFA was computed. The resulting 126 points-long vector was smoothed with a moving average filter (using the MATLAB function smooth, width = 20 samples). To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, the whole recording was used to compute how the HFA co-fluctuated with the gamma phase. To check if the polarity of the gamma signal should be flipped, the average HFA was calculated within a 0.4π wide window centred at the middle (at 0π of the gamma phase, which is where the gamma-filtered data would have its peak) and an average of the two pieces on the side (0.2π wide on each side, where the gamma-filtered data would have its minima). If the average HFA from the middle was lower than the average HFA from the sides, the bipolar signal was flipped (see Figure 5—figure supplement 2). All cortical recordings showed a distinguishable peak, and thus this method helped to ensure that the cortical gamma signal was flipped such that the gamma peak consistently coincided with increases in the HFA.

Finally, to compare changes in spiking probability across the gamma cycle, we split the gamma phase into four non-overlapping phase-bins resulting in bins with a width of 0.5π. Four bins were chosen to allow for a resolution that allowed us to detect differences without resulting in too many multiple comparisons, which needed to be corrected for. The movement-related spiking probabilities for the four phase bins were computed based on data from a −0.1 to –0.4 s window around movement onset. To ensure that the effects are movement-onset-specific, these probabilities were normalized by baseline spiking probabilities, which were computed within a same sized window starting 3 s before movement onset. The relative changes were obtained by subtracting baseline spiking probabilities from movement-related spiking probabilities.

Two-factorial 4 (bin) x 2 (effector side) repeated-measures ANOVAs were computed in SPSS (IBM Statistics SPSS 22, RRID:SCR_002865), to compare spiking probabilities across the four phase-bins. Q-Q plots of the residuals were visually inspected to exclude strong deviations from normality. If the sphericity assumption was violated, Huynh-Feldt correction was applied. As additional analysis, the same two-factorial ANOVA was also computed with five instead of four phase bins. Subsequent pairwise comparisons were performed using t-tests or Wilcoxon signed-rank tests if the normality assumption (assessed by Lilliefors tests) was violated.

Comparison of phase offsets between contra- and ipsilateral gripping

Another key question was whether the timing of STN spikes relative to the cortical gamma phase (from the ECoG sites that showed the strongest coupling during contralateral gripping) systematically differed between contra- and ipsilateral grip trials. Note that because the polarity of the gamma signal was standardized based on the HFA from the whole recording, the polarity was the same for contra- and ipsilateral grip trials. Because here we directly compare the phase difference between contra- and ipsilateral gripping, a difference of 1pi, for example, would remain the same even if the polarity of the whole signal would be flipped, as may occur with bipolar derivations. We computed the circular median of all phases coinciding with STN spikes around movement onset (in a −0.1–0.4 s window). Only recordings with positive PPC values were included resulting in n = 23 as an estimate of the average phase would not be meaningful if the phases were relatively uniformly distributed. The angle difference between contra- and ipsilateral gripping was first tested against zero by computing confidence intervals based on the 23 angle differences (circ_confmean function from the circ_stats toolbox Berens, 2009). We decided not to scale the weight of the angles by the number of spikes included or the PPC strength for each recording as this would bias the average across all recordings towards few data points. Spike numbers were not subsampled, which could have been a step to match spike numbers between recordings, as the estimate of the mean angle only gets more precise with a larger number of representative samples. We also investigated whether the offset of 180° degrees, which became apparent, was specific in time by plotting the time course of the p-values of a V-test (circ_vtest function from the circ_stats toolbox Berens, 2009). A V-test examines the phase differences for circular uniformity, similarly as a Rayleigh test, but is more powerful because a mean difference – in this case 180° – can be specified. Note that the average preferred phase, as compared here, is independent of the coupling strength used to select the ECoG sites. Detecting a significant effect would thus be unrelated to the ECoG selection procedure, however because coupling was strongest around movement onset, the effect would be expected to be temporally specific to windows around movement onset.

Acknowledgements

P Fischer and PB were funded by the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_12024/1). R M R was supported in part by the Walter L Copeland Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation. R S T was supported by the NIH (R01 NS091853-01A1). R S T and R M R received further NIH support (R01 NS110424-01 CRCNS). W J L was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant R01MH107797 (PI, Avniel Ghuman; co-investigator, R M R). P Fries acknowledges grant support by DFG (SPP 1665, FOR 1847, FR2557/5-1-CORNET, FR2557/6-1-NeuroTMR), EU (HEALTH‐F2‐2008‐200728-BrainSynch, FP7-604102-HBP, FP7-600730-Magnetrodes), a European Young Investigator Award, NIH (1U54MH091657-WU-Minn-Consortium-HCP), and LOEWE (NeFF).

Funding Statement

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Contributor Information

Petra Fischer, Email: petra.fischer@ndcn.ox.ac.uk.

R Mark Richardson, Email: Mark.Richardson@mgh.harvard.edu.

Nicole C Swann, University of Oregon, United States.

Laura L Colgin, University of Texas at Austin, United States.

Funding Information

This paper was supported by the following grants:

  • Medical Research Council MC_UU_12024/1 to Petra Fischer, Peter Brown.

  • National Institute for Health Research R01 NS091853-01A1 to Robert S Turner.

  • National Institute for Health Research R01 NS110424-01 CRCNS to Robert S Turner, Robert Mark Richardson.

  • National Institute of Mental Health R01MH107797 to Witold J Lipski, Robert Mark Richardson.

  • Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft SPP 1665 to Pascal Fries.

  • Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft FOR 1847 to Pascal Fries.

  • Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft FR2557/5-1-CORNET to Petra Fischer.

  • Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft FR2557/6-1-NeuroTMR to Petra Fischer.

  • National Institute for Health Research 1U54MH091657-WU-Minn-Consortium-HCP to Pascal Fries.

  • LOEWE Zentrum AdRIA NeFF to Pascal Fries.

  • Pittsburgh Foundation Walter L Copeland Fund to Robert Mark Richardson.

  • European Union 7th Framework Programme HEALTH-F2-2008-200728-BrainSync to Pascal Fries.

  • European Union 7th Framework Programme FP7-604102-HB to Pascal Fries.

  • European Union 7th Framework Programme FP7-600730-Magnetrode to Pascal Fries.

Additional information

Competing interests

No competing interests declared.

Author contributions

Conceptualization, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis, Validation, Visualization, Methodology, Project administration.

Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration.

Resources, Methodology.

Methodology.

Supervision, Methodology.

Supervision, Funding acquisition, Methodology.

Conceptualization, Resources, Data curation, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration.

Ethics

Human subjects: Patients provided written, informed consent in accordance with a protocol approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pittsburgh (IRB Protocol no. PRO13110420).

Additional files

Source code 1. Code to generate the time-frequency figures in the main manuscript and in the supplementary figures including the functions to run the cluster-based permutation statistics.
elife-51956-code1.zip (1.8MB, zip)
Transparent reporting form

Data availability

We have provided the data and the code (including the functions to run the cluster-based permutation statistics) with which one can generate the time-frequency figures in the main manuscript and in the supplementary figures (Fig. 3, 4, Fig. 3- figure supplement 5 and Fig. 4-figure supplement 2).

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Decision letter

Editor: Nicole C Swann1
Reviewed by: Nicole C Swann2

In the interests of transparency, eLife publishes the most substantive revision requests and the accompanying author responses.

Acceptance summary:

Despite the importance of movement for nearly all behaviors, questions still remain about how different brain areas work together to coordinate physiological movements. Here the authors report findings from a unique dataset recorded from Parkinson's disease patients undergoing neurosurgery. Their results characterize interactions between motor cortex electrocorticography and subthalamic nucleus unit activity in humans during performance of a motor task. Their findings provide insight into coordination between subcortical and cortical notes during task-based behavior.

Decision letter after peer review:

Thank you for submitting your article "Movement-related coupling of subthalamic nucleus spikes to cortical γ" for consideration by eLife. Your article has been reviewed by three peer reviewers, including Nicole C Swann as the Reviewing Editor and Reviewer #1, and the evaluation has been overseen by Laura Colgin as the Senior Editor.

The reviewers have discussed the reviews with one another and the Reviewing Editor has drafted this decision to help you prepare a revised submission.

Summary:

In this manuscript the authors recorded intraoperative electrophysiological data from 12 Parkinson's disease patients during a movement task. Electrocorticography and concurrent STN unit recordings were obtained. The authors conducted a number of analyses to describe the electrophysiological patterns during the movements, with special interest in examining interactions between STN units and motor cortex field potentials and comparing patterns between hemispheres (i.e. contra-lateral compared to ipsi-lateral activity, relative to the hand moved). A core finding is that prior to movement there was elevated STN firing to motor cortical field potential locking in the γ (>30 Hz) range. This was more pronounced for contralateral compared to ipsilateral interactions, and not explained by higher STN firing. Next the authors showed that these interactions were modulated as a function of motor speed. Specifically, the phase locking between units and γ ECoG was higher for fast compared to slow movement. The authors further probed these relationships using other analyses focusing on γ phase with respect to unit firing.

Overall, the reviewers found this manuscript to be methodologically impressive and appreciated the challenge of obtaining intraoperative unit and ECoG recordings in humans during a task. The overall finding of increased interaction between sub-cortex and cortex as a function of movement (and movement speed) is also interesting. However, we all had difficulty understanding some of the analyses, particularly the phase-related analyses presented in Figures 5 and 6. Our confusion was not necessarily about what was done, but why and what the biological meaning or significance would be for the results from these analyses. We were concerned this might limit the overall impact of this manuscript for a wider audience. As such, this was the biggest barrier to our enthusiasm for this manuscript, but given our otherwise positive evaluation, we elected to invite a revision. We elaborate on this point and others below.

Essential revisions:

1) A major barrier for this manuscript, in terms of appeal to a wider audience, is the complexity of the analyses used. A challenge to this kind of work, especially using novel approaches like ECoG and STN together, is that a vast search space is opened with multiple electrodes, frequency ranges, time points, units etc. Although the initial analyses (Figures 1-3) were clearly justified, some of the subsequent analysis (such as those associated with Figures 5 and 6) felt a bit post-hoc. It was not always clear why certain approaches were being used and what we learned about the brain, motor system, PD, etc. from the analyses presented. We believe the manuscript would benefit from an easier to follow rationale for each analyses, presented upfront, and clear delineation of which analyses were planned (and why) and which were exploratory (and what statistical corrections were applied).

2) In the manuscript there is not a clear distinction between 'oscillatory' γ (or narrow range γ) and broadband γ. Although both are (unfortunately) called 'γ' in the literature, the emerging view is that the two have very different etiologies with broadband γ being a surrogate for neural firing and the narrow γ being a 'true' oscillation. In places, the authors seem to have made this distinction, specifying narrow γ and showing figures where γ is focused in a relatively narrow range (Figure 2A). However, in other portions of the manuscript the distinction is unclear. For instance, in Figure 2B there is clearly a broadband γ response which is expected to occur in motor cortex during movement (see Crone, 1998, for instance), but it is presented with a narrowband result (Figure 2A)? Do the authors believe these two examples reflect the same underlying process? Can more explanation be given please?

We appreciate it may not always be possible to differentiate whether a particular result is driven by broadband or oscillatory γ but it would be helpful for the authors to spend some time clarifying that they are different proposed etiologies for γ activity in the Introduction and interpret their results with this context. The authors should also show that there is indeed a γ oscillation present in the signal, by showing a power spectral density plot, for example. This is important because if the effects are primarily driven by broadband γ, then it makes less sense to extract phase (as there would be no oscillation present).

3) There were 28 units from 12 people so there is some dependency with the analyses. Including independent and dependent samples in the same analyses can be problematic (see Aarts et al., 2014, Nature Neuroscience). The authors should, at least, report how many units each patient contributed and how many units per participant were included in each analysis so that the reader can assess if effects may have been driven by a subset of patients.

4) We all really struggled to understand some of the phase analyses. For instance, we understand the need to invert the phase of a raw signal, but it was not clear to us why a signal reflecting γ phase, derived from γ amplitude, would need to be flipped. We also did not understand the criteria for deciding a flip needed to be performed. Please clarify these analyses.

It was also confusing to even understand what HFA was meant to reflect. It is defined in the beginning of the manuscript as simply "high frequency activity" which might be expected to reflect amplitude of higher frequency activity (which might be derived simply by high pass filtering signal and then computing amplitude from the complex signal) but later very different procedure was described to calculate it, which we did not understand. Please clarify what HFA is meant to reflect and how the reported analysis represents it.

5) In Figure 3. It is interesting that higher coupling (between fast and slow trials) starts so sharply and exactly at the Go signal. Do the author's have an idea why it could be so precise? Could it just appear to be occurring at this time because of window used? The timing makes is seem almost artifactual. Is this somehow a by-product of analysis window selection?

6) Could there be differences in baseline motor function that could account for some of the differences seen between contralateral and ipsilateral gripping? For example, if recordings were always done in more (or less) severely affected hemisphere of the PD patients, this could explain some of the electrophysiologic differences seen between contralateral and ipsilateral gripping. Likewise, dominant hand should also be reported since this might impact the hemisphereic findings.

7) Determining strip location using fluoroscopy would result in a very coarse localization. Was fluoroscopy performed in multiple planes? Since their location-related findings make sense (movement related changes in the precentral gyrus), localization was presumably accurate, but nonetheless, limitations to the localization should be noted in the Limitations section.

8) Please add trial numbers for each participant.

9) Given that narrowband γ activity has been associated with pathophysiology (i.e. involuntary movements), please add information about the relationship between the disease state/scores and the magnitude of the coupling. Is this event-related coupling modulated at all by disease or is it purely a movement-related effect?

10) Figure 2C. Was the firing rate analyzed using the same variable windows described for coupling analysis? Or do they report instantaneous firing rate? Would results be different if alternative method was used?

[Editors' note: further revisions were suggested prior to acceptance, as described below.]

Thank you for resubmitting your article "Movement-related coupling of human subthalamic nucleus spikes to cortical γ" for consideration by eLife. Your article has been reviewed and extensively discussed by the original three peer reviewers, including Nicole C Swann as the Reviewing Editor and Reviewer #1, and the evaluation has been overseen by Laura Colgin as the Senior Editor.

Summary:

The authors have addressed many of our comments, but we do have some additional concerns.

First, although some points of the methods have been well-clarified, others are still quite difficult to understand. We elaborate on this below. Additionally, now that we better understand the methods used, this has raised some additional questions which we discuss below. Overall, the results that correspond to Figures 1-4 are clear and well-motivated, but the later ones remain challenging to interpret.

Essential revisions:

– Although improved, many aspects of the methods and results are still very difficult to understand. It is often difficult to understand what data went into what analyses and what each analysis reflects. One option would be to include a schematic figure to illustrate this. Also, in the results, it might be helpful to move some of the details to the Materials and methods and try to explain the analyses more conceptually – i.e. what was the analysis testing [i.e. what do the results mean] and what did you find? For instance, some of the detail in subsection “STN spiking probability is modulated relative to the cortical γ phase” seems more appropriate for methods.

– For the electrode selection method – please add a bit more detail. The authors state that the electrodes with strongest spike-to-γ coupling were used. Strongest compared to what? Strongest per subject? Strongest relative to group? It would be helpful to get a sense of what the other electrodes showed? Was there no coupling? Or did all electrodes show some coupling, but not as much. Perhaps at least an example of coupling for all electrodes in an example subject would help give a better sense of the data.

– Analysis in Figure 5C seems a bit biased. Since electrodes were selected based on strongest coupling in this time-range, is it surprising that the phase is most consistent there as well? Other time periods would be expected to have systematically less coupling in general, right? Perhaps because they have inconsistent phase? This should be corrected or at least, this potential confound should be discussed.

– In the Materials and methods it is mentioned that the ECoG is filtered with a bandpass cutoff of 250 Hz, so how can the HFA include activity at >300 Hz? Further to this point, from the Materials and methods, it sounds as the filtering has been done "online". From the writing it is not clear if the entire filtering (notch filtering and also the band pass filtering) was done online or only the notch filtering was done online. If former is the case, doesn't this mean that the recorded data was filtered at 250 Hz and then stored by the recording system? Then how was it possible to analyze >300 Hz activity if it was above the filtering cut off? Please clarify this point. Also please add filter details for bandpass filter.

– The rationale for calculating HFA is not clear. The authors cite Logothetis, 2003 for the selection of the 300 Hz cutoff, however, it seems this paper used the 300 Hz cutoff for multi-unit activity, and here the authors are using ECoG. STN LFPS focus on higher ranges, but in ECoG, broadband γ as a surrogate for neural firing extend much lower (extending down to 70 Hz), and have generally not been reported >300 Hz. If the broadband signal really does extend this low, there would be overlap with the narrowband signal, which would complicate the coupling analysis. Finally, could the authors clarify how the use of the full wave reactivation compares to taking the analytic amplitude of the signal? It was not clear why rectification was used as the analytic amplitude approach would be more conventional and perhaps reflect more readily the author's goals (if we understand correctly)? In short, this portion of the paper is hard to understand. Please clarify or perhaps remove from the manuscript.

– The Authors mention that they use notch filter to at 60 Hz to remove line noise. Please specify the notch filter characteristics. This is important given that the 60-80 Hz frequency range is used to analyze γ activity which partly includes the line noise frequency range.

– Some of the interpretations in subsection “Cortical high-frequency activity increases faster in sites that show strongest γ coupling during contralateral gripping” seem very definitive when maybe they are really more hypotheses. The authors may consider toning town the language a bit.

– For our original point 9 – The author's explanation makes sense, but the variability of relationships between unit to ECoG coupling within a person should be stated somewhere in the manuscript. The authors may also want to mention that this is why across subject's correlations related to clinical severity cannot be examined.

– Please put the table with patient characteristics and experimental information back in main manuscript (not supplements).

– It would be preferable to include the task schematic and a bit more description in the main paper, not just the supplements.

– For the comparison of phase offset between contra- vs ipsi- gripping, one concern is if the 180 degree difference could be due to the bipolar montage (i.e. signals were flipped for a trivial reason). How do the authors know that this is not the case? (Since they describe in detail the need to flip signals for the HFA analysis). We may be mis-understanding here.

– It would be helpful to provide a bit more context about the Cheyne paper and why it was selected for this comparison. Also, although it is somewhat obvious given the paper was published 11 years ago, it might be helpful to clearly state that this was an independent paper, in different participants. Also, related to this, the authors refer to "detected in MEG studies", but then cite just one paper. Perhaps change to "detected in a MEG study".

eLife. 2020 Mar 11;9:e51956. doi: 10.7554/eLife.51956.sa2

Author response


Essential revisions:

1) A major barrier for this manuscript, in terms of appeal to a wider audience, is the complexity of the analyses used. A challenge to this kind of work, especially using novel approaches like ECoG and STN together, is that a vast search space is opened with multiple electrodes, frequency ranges, time points, units etc. Although the initial analyses (Figures 1-3) were clearly justified, some of the subsequent analysis (such as those associated with Figures 5 and 6) felt a bit post-hoc. It was not always clear why certain approaches were being used and what we learned about the brain, motor system, PD, etc. from the analyses presented. We believe the manuscript would benefit from an easier to follow rationale for each analyses, presented upfront, and clear delineation of which analyses were planned (and why) and which were exploratory (and what statistical corrections were applied).

Thank you for highlighting this. We have now provided a more detailed rationale in the Introduction:

“Inspired by previous findings that have demonstrated strong correlation between movement kinematics and basal ganglia γ-band activity (Brücke et al., 2012; Fischer et al., 2017; Lofredi et al., 2018), we aim to shed light on the underlying neurophysiological mechanism resulting in cortico-subcortical communication in the γ band. Therefore, we set out to examine if STN spike-to-cortical γ phase coupling can predict the timing or vigour of contralateral action initiation. […]

Oscillations in the motor cortical LFP can capture periods of periodically discharging neurons (Donoghue et al., 1998). We aimed to capture this periodic discharge by using a proxy of multi-unit activity – high frequency activity (HFA, here defined as >300 Hz high-pass filtered activity) to examine if those ECoG sites in which γ was coupled most strongly with STN spikes were distinct in showing a steeper increase of HFA, and thus discharge activity, within each γ cycle. Additionally, to further investigate the organization of a widespread cortical γ power increase as an exploratory side question, we examined whether systematic phase shifts provide evidence of information segregation (Maris et al., 2013, 2016; van Ede et al., 2015) between distinct cortical sites during contra and ipsilateral movement.”

We have also added to the Results:

“If STN spikes that occur at one phase of the cortical γ cycle contribute to boosting cortical γ for contralateral movements, then during ipsilateral movements unintentional boosting of γ could be avoided if spikes would occur at the opposite phase (i.e. 180° apart). The following section will quantify if such a systematic difference in spike timing was present. This analysis was also motivated by the above reported differences in spiking probabilities between contra- and ipsilateral gripping observed at a specific phase of the γ cycle.”

And in the section “Cortical high-frequency activity increases faster in sites that show strongest γ coupling during contralateral gripping”:

“The final two analyses were performed to understand how local ECoG γ activity was distinct between different cortical sites during contra- and ipsilateral movements, and were more exploratory in nature.”

We also acknowledged in the Discussion that the final two analyses were exploratory:

“The sign of the shift flipped between contralateral and ipsilateral grip trials, which could potentially indicate a directional change in information flow (Battaglia et al., 2012; Besserve et al., 2015). However, we would like to acknowledge that this analysis was exploratory and that the phase difference was only significant during ipsilateral gripping, where γ power was relatively weak.[…]The final two exploratory analyses investigating phase offsets between γ oscillations in different ECoG sites and the steepness of the HFA increase would also be more informative if a more consistent grid coverage had been present. We nevertheless reported these findings to motivate future studies of movement-related precentral and postcentral γ activity that could be examined with ECoG recordings alone.”

We did not perform any form of statistical corrections for the final two more exploratory analyses, however, it is now clear from the additional text that they were exploratory.

2) In the manuscript there is not a clear distinction between 'oscillatory' γ (or narrow range γ) and broadband γ. Although both are (unfortunately) called 'γ' in the literature, the emerging view is that the two have very different etiologies with broadband γ being a surrogate for neural firing and the narrow γ being a 'true' oscillation. In places, the authors seem to have made this distinction, specifying narrow γ and showing figures where γ is focused in a relatively narrow range (Figure 2A). However, in other portions of the manuscript the distinction is unclear. For instance, in Figure 2B there is clearly a broadband γ response which is expected to occur in motor cortex during movement (see Crone, 1998, for instance), but it is presented with a narrowband result (Figure 2A)? Do the authors believe these two examples reflect the same underlying process? Can more explanation be given please?

We appreciate it may not always be possible to differentiate whether a particular result is driven by broadband or oscillatory γ but it would be helpful for the authors to spend some time clarifying that they are different proposed etiologies for γ activity in the Introduction and interpret their results with this context. The authors should also show that there is indeed a γ oscillation present in the signal, by showing a power spectral density plot, for example. This is important because if the effects are primarily driven by broadband γ, then it makes less sense to extract phase (as there would be no oscillation present).

We agree that the distinction between true oscillatory narrow-band and non-oscillatory broadband γ is a difficult issue with ECoG recordings. Broadband γ reflects the shapes of short neuronal events (Ray and Maunsell, 2011), including postsynaptic potentials (PSPs) and action potentials (APs). Each individual PSP has a roughly exponential shape in time, which corresponds to a 1/f shape in frequency (Miller et al., 2011, PLOS Comp Biology), and each AP corresponds to a broad band between 150 and 5000 Hz. At the level of spikes, even closely neighbouring neurons show only weak pairwise correlations (Schneidman et al., 2006, Nature), hence neurons distributed between the STN and cortex are expected to have very weak pairwise spike correlations. Thus, spikes from an individual STN neuron are not expected to show significant locking to broadband cortical γ that captures superimposed APs and PSPs. However, as further discussed below, we think that 60-80 Hz activity captures true oscillations which explains the difference between Figure 2B and 2A.

We also computed the power spectrum based on the -0.1:0.4s window around movement onset, and it looks like there is a distinct peak between 60- 80 Hz (red dashed lines = 60 and 80 Hz). However, the graph may be misleading because a 60 Hz online notch filter was applied during the recordings. Because of this difficulty in interpreting the spectrum and because a distinct peak in the power spectrum is not necessarily a prerequisite for true synchronization (Brunet, 2014), we decided not to include this figure in the manuscript.

Author response image 1. Power spectrum based on the -0.1:0.4s window around movement onset.

Author response image 1.

However, we have now added to the Results:

“Movement-related cortical power changes showed a broad power increase between 60-150 Hz (Figure 2B) that is typically observed in ECoG recordings. Such broad power increases can reflect both true oscillatory components as well as non-oscillatory broadband activity capturing short neural events (Ray and Maunsell, 2011). To focus on the 60-80 Hz oscillatory component of interest, we pre-selected the ECoG contacts with the highest PLV between 60-80 Hz over a -0.1 – 0.4s period around movement onset (Figure 1E).”

We have also added to the Discussion:

“Because ECoG signals tend to show a very broad movement-related power increase between 50-200 Hz, past research has primarily focussed on the coupling of spikes to the amplitude of 50-200 Hz activity (Shimamoto et al., 2013; Lipski et al., 2017), which captures aspects of neural activity that are separate from the narrow-band γ phase. […] Our choice of extracting the 60-80 Hz phase also appears valid when considering the clear co-modulation of the amplitude of high frequency activity with the 60-80 Hz filtered signal.”

3) There were 28 units from 12 people so there is some dependency with the analyses. Including independent and dependent samples in the same analyses can be problematic (see Aarts et al. 2014, Nature Neuroscience). The authors should, at least, report how many units each patient contributed and how many units per participant were included in each analysis so that the reader can assess if effects may have been driven by a subset of patients.

“The number of units included per patient ranged between 1 and 5 (n = 5: 1 unit, n = 2: 2 units, n = 3: 3 units, n = 2: 5 units). If subsets of recordings were analysed, then the numbers on the relative contributions are reported in the figure caption.”

We have also added the corresponding numbers for the sub-selection of units to the figure caption of Figure 5 and 6.

4) We all really struggled to understand some of the phase analyses. For instance, we understand the need to invert the phase of a raw signal, but it was not clear to us why a signal reflecting γ phase, derived from γ amplitude, would need to be flipped. We also did not understand the criteria for deciding a flip needed to be performed. Please clarify these analyses.

Thank you for pointing out that this was not clear. Group statistics on how the spike probability changes relative to the γ cycle, for example, and also on the evolving HFA, can only be meaningfully computed if the polarity of the signal that is used as reference for when the γ peaks and troughs occurred is standardized.

We now provide a more detailed explanation with a new supplementary figure and have replaced the potentially confusing term “phase flipping” with “polarity flipping”.

We have added to the Results section:

“The binning was preceded by a procedure to standardize the polarity of the bipolar signals across all recordings (see Materials and methods, Figure 4—figure supplement 1 and 2). Group statistics across all patients can only be meaningfully computed after flipping each cortical bipolar signal according to whether the peak of the γ-filtered bipolar signal coincides with the peak of the co-modulated HFA or with its trough. Both are equally likely and depend on the order of subtraction of the two ECoG signals that were used to derive the spatially focal bipolar signal (see Figure 4—figure supplement 1). Hence the polarity needs to be standardized.”

It was also confusing to even understand what HFA was meant to reflect. It is defined in the beginning of the manuscript as simply "high frequency activity" which might be expected to reflect amplitude of higher frequency activity (which might be derived simply by high pass filtering signal and then computing amplitude from the complex signal) but later very different procedure was described to calculate it, which we did not understand. Please clarify what HFA is meant to reflect and how the reported analysis represents it.

When introducing the term HFA, we have now added a definition:

“We aimed to capture this periodic discharge by using a proxy of multi-unit activity – high frequency activity (HFA, here defined as >300 Hz high-pass filtered and full-wave rectified activity) […]”.

And to our description (“First, the local high-frequency activity (HFA) was computed by high-pass filtering the ECoG signal at 300 Hz, full-wave rectifying and low-pass filtering at 100 Hz.”):

The low-pass filtering is part of a classical procedure to obtain a measure of MUA (see for example Eckhorn et al., 1988) and reduces the fast fluctuations of the >300Hz amplitude to obtain a smoother average, as you can see in Author response image 2:

Author response image 2. Low-pass filter effect.

Author response image 2.

We have now expanded this section (without adding the figure):

“First, the local high-frequency activity (HFA) was computed by high-pass filtering the ECoG signal at 300 Hz, full-wave rectifying and low-pass filtering with a cut-off of 100 Hz. This is a commonly used procedure (e.g. Eckhorn et al., 1988; Pooresmaeili et al., 2010)with the cutoff of 300 Hz considered a good threshold to obtain an estimate of multi-unit activity(Logothetis, 2003), although its precise value is not critical. The low-pass filtering results in a smoother version of the >300 Hz rectified signal, reducing fast fluctuations and resulting in a smoother co-modulation of the HFA with the peaks and troughs of the evolving 60-80 Hz γ signal. Importantly, detecting multi-unit activity close to the recording sites, i.e. detecting when >300 Hz amplitude is increased, is invariant to the order of subtraction of the two neighbouring ECoG contacts that is performed to initially compute the bipolar signal (see Figure 4—figure supplement 1). Hence the HFA is an ideal feature to standardize the polarity of the bipolar signal across all recordings.”

5) In Figure 3. It is interesting that higher coupling (between fast and slow trials) starts so sharply and exactly at the Go signal. Do the author's have an idea why it could be so precise? Could it just appear to be occurring at this time because of window used? The timing makes is seem almost artifactual. Is this somehow a by-product of analysis window selection?

The windows centered around the GO signal to compute the coupling strength spanned on average -0.16:0.16s, hence the difference did not necessarily start as sharply as it may look like in the figure. Moreover, the green colour extends slightly to the left of the Go signal. The onset of the effect looks very sharp only because the outline of the significant cluster starts just at the dashed line. The difference cannot be a by-product of the window selection procedure, as the -0.1:0.4s window around grip onset used for the selection procedure occurs much later.

6) Could there be differences in baseline motor function that could account for some of the differences seen between contralateral and ipsilateral gripping? For example, if recordings were always done in more (or less) severely affected hemisphere of the PD patients, this could explain some of the electrophysiologic differences seen between contralateral and ipsilateral gripping. Likewise, dominant hand should also be reported since this might impact the hemisphereic findings.

We have now added information on the recorded hemispheres, handedness, more severe side of motor symptoms and the number of trials for each patient. We also compared if symptom severity was worse on the contra- or ipsilateral side and now report in the article that symptoms tended to be worse ipsilateral to the recorded STN/motor cortex, which may also contribute to the difference seen between contra- and ipsilateral gripping. That the symptoms were worse on the ipsilateral side was merely a coincidence and not a planned part of the protocol.

7) Determining strip location using fluoroscopy would result in a very coarse localization. Was fluoroscopy performed in multiple planes? Since their location-related findings make sense (movement related changes in the precentral gyrus), localization was presumably accurate, but nonetheless, limitations to the localization should be noted in the Limitations section.

Thank you for pointing out the lack of clarity in the description of the localization procedure. All electrode locations were obtained using a published and CT validated approach by projecting the intraoperative fluoroscopy to common fiducials/landmarks on the volumetric pre and postoperative images to determine the closest brain surface vertex in proximity to the metal artefact of contact of the electrode (Randazzo et al., 2016). The reviewer is right that this does not give a definitive anatomical verification of the location, but we are confident that the correct location of each contact on individual gyri can be determined with acceptable certainty. Nevertheless, we have added a brief paragraph to acknowledge the limitation:

“We acknowledge that electrode locations were determined indirectly, as our intraoperative imaging modality was two dimensional, however our two-dimensional to three-dimensional fusion technique previously was shown to localize ECoG recording locations with high functional-anatomic accuracy (Randazzo et al., 2016).”

8) Please add trial numbers for each participant.

9) Given that narrowband γ activity has been associated with pathophysiology (i.e. involuntary movements), please add information about the relationship between the disease state/scores and the magnitude of the coupling. Is this event-related coupling modulated at all by disease or is it purely a movement-related effect?

From our data it is unfortunately not possible to tell if coupling would become weaker as the disease progresses or if it was stronger in those patients who were more prone to dyskinesia because the coupling strength varies strongly with the nature of the captured units. For example, within one patient, who contributed 5 different units, the coupling strength was highly variable between the different cells, partly because of a difference in spike numbers but also because of a genuine variability in coupling strength between cells. A correlation with disease, tremor or dyskinesia severity could only be meaningfully computed if a large enough number of cells would be available for each patient to compute an average coupling score for each patient before attempting a correlation.

Furthermore none of the patients were dyskinetic as they were off levodopa when they were recorded.

10) Figure 2C. Was the firing rate analyzed using the same variable windows described for coupling analysis? Or do they report instantaneous firing rate? Would results be different if alternative method was used?

We used the variable window procedure only to compute the ISI CV, percentage bursting and the ISI mode among the firing characteristics. For the firing rates we had to use a different procedure, as by design the variable window procedure would return the same firing rate for each window (that are scaled in size to contain the same number of spikes). To make it comparable, though, we computed the firing rates within a 0.3s window around each time point, because the average window in the other procedure would also span 0.3s.

We state that at the very beginning of the Materials and methods section on Firing characteristics:

“Firing rates were calculated within a 300ms window around each time point to get a time-evolving estimate.”

If we would compute instantaneous firing rates, the results would look similar (see the right column in Author response image 3 compared to Figure 2C from the paper to the left). We have also added the following sentence to the Results: “This was the case not only when computing average firing rates in 0.3s long sliding windows as shown in Figure 2C, matching the average window length used to calculate the coupling strength, but also when examining instantaneous firing rates.”

Author response image 3. Comparison of analyses using 300ms average versus instanteous firing rate.

Author response image 3.

[Editors' note: further revisions were suggested prior to acceptance, as described below.]

Essential revisions:

– Although improved, many aspects of the Materials and methods and Results are still very difficult to understand. It is often difficult to understand what data went into what analyses and what each analysis reflects. One option would be to include a schematic figure to illustrate this.

Thank you for raising this issue. To provide a better overview what each figure reflects and what answers can be drawn from them, we have now also added a new figure (Figure 7), which highlights the questions we covered in this study.

We have also removed some of the analyses that only considered a subset of the data (further detailed below).

Also, in the Results, it might be helpful to move some of the details to the Materials and methods and try to explain the analyses more conceptually – i.e. what was the analysis testing [i.e. what do the results mean] and what did you find? For instance, some of the detail in subsection “STN spiking probability is modulated relative to the cortical γ phase” seems more appropriate for methods.

We have removed the details from the Results and have ensured that the procedure is explained in detail in the Materials and methods. The section is now shorter and easier to read. We have also moved the right column of Figure 5 (old Figure 4) to the supplementary figures, because all other results based on this alternative set of ECoG sites are now also only shown in the supplementary figures.

– For the electrode selection method – please add a bit more detail. The authors state that the electrodes with strongest spike-to-γ coupling were used. Strongest compared to what? Strongest per subject? Strongest relative to group? It would be helpful to get a sense of what the other electrodes showed? Was there no coupling? Or did all electrodes show some coupling, but not as much. Perhaps at least an example of coupling for all electrodes in an example subject would help give a better sense of the data.

It was strongest spike-to-γ coupling per spike recording. We have now added in the Results section:

“The bipolar contact pairs with the strongest cortical γ phase coupling to STN spikes during contralateral gripping per spike recording were concentrated in lateral precentral gyrus.”

And in the Materials and methods:

For each spike recording, the ECoG contact with the highest PLV between 60-80 Hz and within -0.1 – 0.4s around movement onset during contralateral gripping was pre-selected for further analyses.

We have now also added an example recording as Figure 2—figure supplement 1 to show the distribution of coupling strengths during contra- and ipsilateral gripping. This figure also shows that there may have been more than one site showing significant coupling.

– For the comparison of phase offset between contra- vs ipsi- gripping, one concern is if the 180 degree difference could be due to the bipolar montage (i.e. signals were flipped for a trivial reason). How do the authors know that this is not the case? (Since they describe in detail the need to flip signals for the HFA analysis). We may be mis-understanding here…

Thank you for pointing out that this was unclear. The comparison between the preferred phase of spikes during contra- and ipsilateral gripping did not depend on the signal-flipping procedure because the polarity-standardization procedure was performed on the whole recording, hence the bipolar montage was the same for contra- and ipsilateral grip trials. Note that for this analysis, fixed phase offsets are irrelevant: When computing the relative difference between the preferred phase during contra- and ipsilateral gripping, a difference of, for example, one pi, would remain the same irrespective of the polarity. If the ECoG phase vector values would all be shifted by +pi (which is what happens when flipping the polarity), then the preferred phase during contralateral gripping would change for example from 1.5pi to 2.5pi and for ipsilateral gripping, for example from 0.5pi to 1.5 pi. Hence, the circular distance (1.5pi – 0.5pi = 1pi and 2.5pi-1.5pi = 1pi) would remain the same.

We have now added a more detailed explanation in the Materials and methods section:

Another key question was whether the timing of STN spikes relative to the cortical γ phase systematically differed between contra- and ipsilateral grip trials. Note that because the polarity of the γ signal was standardized based on the HFA from the whole recording, the polarity was the same for contra- and ipsilateral grip trials. Because here we directly compare the phase difference between contra- and ipsilateral gripping, a difference of 1pi, for example, would remain the same even if the polarity of the whole signal would be flipped, as may occur with bipolar derivations.

– Analysis in Figure 5C seems a bit biased. Since electrodes were selected based on strongest coupling in this time-range, is it surprising that the phase is most consistent there as well? Other time periods would be expected to have systematically less coupling in general, right? Perhaps because they have inconsistent phase? This should be corrected or at least, this potential confound should be discussed.

Figure 5C mainly served to double-check if the effect is indeed specific to movement, where we observed stronger coupling. We have now modified the Results section:

“P-values derived from a V-test assessing directionality towards an offset of 180° showed that, as expected, the significant phase difference was only present around movement onset (Figure 6C), where coupling was strongest.”

The preferred spike timing per se for individual recordings, which we compared in Figure 5C, is independent of the coupling strength, so the fact that the effect is present in this window does not merely stem from the electrode selection. However, as the reviewers pointed out, the fact that we don’t see it in other windows is also linked to the fact that there was no consistent coupling.

Now we also acknowledge in the Materials and methods:

“A V-test examines the phase differences for circular uniformity, similarly as a Rayleigh test, but is more powerful because a mean difference – in this case 180° – can be specified. Note that the average preferred phase, as compared here, is independent of the coupling strength used to select the ECoG sites. Detecting a significant effect would thus be unrelated to the ECoG selection procedure, however because coupling was strongest around movement onset, the effect would be expected to be temporally specific to windows around movement onset.”

– In the Materials and methods it is mentioned that the ECoG is filtered with a bandpass cutoff of 250 Hz, so how can the HFA include activity at >300 Hz? Further to this point, from the Materials and methods, it sounds as the filtering has been done "online". From the writing it is not clear if the entire filtering (notch filtering and also the band pass filtering) was done online or only the notch filtering was done online. If former is the case, doesn't this mean that the recorded data was filtered at 250 Hz and then stored by the recording system? Then how was it possible to analyze >300 Hz activity if it was above the filtering cut off? Please clarify this point. Also please add filter details for bandpass filter.

According to the Ripple Neuro support team, the online 250 Hz low-pass 4th order Butterworth filter attenuates 250 Hz signals by 3 dB and signals at 400 Hz by 16 dB. So despite strong attenuation, the signal still contains information. However, we agree that it is preferable to perform the analyses of the high-frequency activity on unfiltered high-resolution data, which is why we have now retrieved the raw data sampled at 30 kHz and performed the analysis of 300 Hz high-pass filtered activity on this broadband data.

We have also added the filter details to the Materials and methods:

“ECoG signals were amplified, online notch filtered (at 60, 120, and 180 Hz, 2nd order Butterworth filter), online bandpass filtered (0.3–250 Hz, 4th order Butterworth filter) and digitized at 1,000 Hz using the Grapevine NIPS. In addition to the down-sampled data, a broadband version of the data was also recorded at 30 kHz (low-pass filtered with a 3rd order Butterworth anti-aliasing filter at 7500 Hz), which was used for analyses of 300 Hz high-pass filtered high-frequency activity.”

– The rationale for calculating HFA is not clear. The authors cite Logothetis, 2003 for the selection of the 300 Hz cutoff, however, it seems this paper used the 300 Hz cutoff for multi-unit activity, and here the authors are using ECoG. STN LFPS focus on higher ranges, but in ECoG, broadband γ as a surrogate for neural firing extend much lower (extending down to 70 Hz), and have generally not been reported >300 Hz. If the broadband signal really does extend this low, there would be overlap with the narrowband signal, which would complicate the coupling analysis. Finally, could the authors clarify how the use of the full wave reactivation compares to taking the analytic amplitude of the signal? It was not clear why rectification was used as the analytic amplitude approach would be more conventional and perhaps reflect more readily the author's goals (if we understand correctly)? In short, this portion of the paper is hard to understand. Please clarify or perhaps remove from the manuscript.

How the HFA evolved relative to the γ phase in individual patients looked similar when using the 30 kHz data compared to the 1000 Hz data. In Author response image 4 we show two example recordings, which also show that taking the amplitude of the analytic signal (3rd column) or taking the >150 Hz high-pass filtered activity instead of 300 Hz (4th column) would result in the same decision regarding the polarity. In fact, for all the 28 recordings, the polarity standardization results based on the 30 kHz data would not change if we would use the latter two, which we now also point out in the Materials and methods:

Author response image 4. The first column shows two examples of the HFA based on the 1000 Hz data, which was used in the previous version of our article.

Author response image 4.

The second column shows HFA based on the 30 kHz data, which is what we have used now for the revised version.

“A 150 Hz high-pass filter, or alternatively computing the amplitude of the analytic signal instead of full-wave rectification, would have provided the same results.”

Taking the amplitude of the analytic signal or full-wave rectifying the signal would thus both be valid options. Because low-pass filtering is performed as a next step, the choice would make barely any difference. We decided to stay with the latter because the convention in past studies was also to use full-wave rectification (Eckhorn et al., 1988; Pooresmaeili et al., 2010).

We have also retained 300 Hz as reported threshold, because the principle of using 300 Hz high-pass filtered activity as a proxy of background firing is the same irrespective of using microelectrodes arrays or ECoG strips. As the reviewers pointed out, using for example >70 Hz filtered activity as HFA would result in an overlap with the narrowband signal. It would be more difficult to detect nesting of HFA within the γ cycle if we would have considered such low activity as HFA, because power fluctuations would likely be dominated more strongly by the lower frequencies where power fluctuations are slower and would thus unlikely show clear co-fluctuations with the 60-80 Hz phase. Using the 300 Hz cut-off thus made sure that our HFA was far away from the 60-80 Hz band.

We would like to acknowledge that, as the reviewers state, broadband high-frequency activity as a surrogate for neural firing can extend down to 70 Hz (which we also acknowledged in the discussion). However, now we do not report the old Figure 6 anymore, where we had shown the average HFA as a proxy of firing co-fluctuating with the γ phase. Now we only use the HFA as a tool to standardize the polarity.

We have added this to the Materials and methods:

“Using a cutoff of 300 Hz made sure that we could detect fast fluctuations of activity. This would have been more difficult if a cutoff in the vicinity of 60-80 Hz were used because the signal would then likely be dominated by slower fluctuations in lower frequencies.”

Using the 30 kHz data instead of the 1000 Hz data, however, did result in a different polarity for 7 out of 28 recordings. See for example, the following case in Author response image 5:

Author response image 5. Comparison of analysis using data sampled at 1000Hz versus 30kHz.

Author response image 5.

This resulted in slightly different p-values for the comparisons of the spiking probability across bins. We have thus modified the analysis to be computed across 4 phase bins instead of 5 phase bins (see updated Results and Materials and methods sections). The modulation across 5 bins still did reach significance (as shown in Figure 5—figure supplement 3), however, although the difference of probabilities in individual bins between contra and ipsilateral gripping was less pronounced than found previously.

The analyses of the steepness of the HFA increase and the CIs for the phase difference formerly reported in the old Figure 6 were not significant in the new analyses based on 30 kHz data. Hence all sections on this topic were removed from the revised manuscript. The only effect we have still included is that the HFA was significantly higher during contralateral vs. ipsilateral gripping in the beginning of the Results section.

– The Authors mention that they use notch filter to at 60 Hz to remove line noise. Please specify the notch filter characteristics. This is important given that the 60-80 Hz frequency range is used to analyze γ activity which partly includes the line noise frequency range.

We have now added the information that it was 2nd order Butterworth filter in brackets. The filter resulted in a very focussed attenuation of the line noise, as you can see in the examples of two power spectra in Author response image 6:

Author response image 6. Line-noise attenuation.

Author response image 6.

– Some of the interpretations in subsection “Cortical high-frequency activity increases faster in sites that show strongest γ coupling during contralateral gripping” seem very definitive when maybe they are really more hypotheses. The authors may consider toning town the language a bit.

Thank you for pointing this out. This section has now been removed.

– For our original point 9 – The author's explanation makes sense, but the variability of relationships between unit to ECoG coupling within a person should be stated somewhere in the manuscript. The authors may also want to mention that this is why across subject's correlations related to clinical severity cannot be examined.

We have now added to the Discussion:

“Note that because coupling strength varies strongly with the nature of the captured units, and thus different units recorded from one patient can result in variable coupling values, we did not perform correlations between coupling strength and disease severity. To meaningfully compute such correlations, the number of cells sampled from each patient would need to be large enough to compute a reliable mean coupling score.”

– Please put the table with patient characteristics and experimental information back in main manuscript (not supplements).

We have now moved it into the main manuscript.

– It would be preferable to include the task schematic and a bit more description in the main paper, not just the supplements.

We have added it as Figure 1 to the main paper and provided more information in the figure caption.

– It would be helpful to provide a bit more context about the Cheyne paper and why it was selected for this comparison. Also, although it is somewhat obvious given the paper was published 11 years ago, it might be helpful to clearly state that this was an independent paper, in different participants. Also, related to this, the authors refer to "detected in MEG studies", but then cite just one paper. Perhaps change to "detected in a MEG study".

We have changed it to “detected in a previous MEG study” and have also changed the description in the figure caption to “A magnetoencephalography study in healthy participants showed independently from our study that γ oscillations at the onset of finger movements are focal to lateral motor cortex (Cheyne et al. 2008).”

We now also elaborate further in the Results section:

“First, we assessed if movement-related STN spike-to-cortical γ coupling was specific to a region of primary motor cortex that has also been demonstrated to show the strongest movement-related γ power increase in MEG recordings (Figure 2B, adapted from Cheyne et al., 2008). This MEG study has shown a contralateral γ increase at highly specific spatial locations for individual limb movements, which was highly consistent over repeated measurements and sessions (Cheyne et al., 2008; Cheyne, 2013).”

Associated Data

    This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

    Supplementary Materials

    Figure 3—source data 1. Source data for Figure 3 showing contralateral grip trials.
    Figure 3—source data 2. Source data for Figure 3 showing ipsilateral grip trials.
    Figure 3—figure supplement 5—source data 1. Source data to Figure 3—figure supplement 5 showing coupling with IPSI GRIP ECoG sites during contralateral grip trials.
    Figure 3—figure supplement 5—source data 2. Source data to Figure 3—figure supplement 5 showing coupling with IPSI GRIP ECoG sites during ipsilateral grip trials.
    Source code 1. Code to generate the time-frequency figures in the main manuscript and in the supplementary figures including the functions to run the cluster-based permutation statistics.
    elife-51956-code1.zip (1.8MB, zip)
    Transparent reporting form

    Data Availability Statement

    We have provided the data and the code (including the functions to run the cluster-based permutation statistics) with which one can generate the time-frequency figures in the main manuscript and in the supplementary figures (Fig. 3, 4, Fig. 3- figure supplement 5 and Fig. 4-figure supplement 2).


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