Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 21, 2026
A Standardized Protocol for Functional Motor Mapping Using Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Published on: February 27, 2026
Preoperative multimodal motor mapping: a comparison of magnetoencephalography imaging, navigated transcranial
Phiroz E Tarapore1, Matthew C Tate, Anne M Findlay
1Department of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143, USA.
Object:
Direct cortical stimulation (DCS) is the gold-standard technique for motor mapping during craniotomy. However, preoperative noninvasive motor mapping is becoming increasingly accurate. Two such noninvasive modalities are navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) imaging. While MEG imaging has already been extensively validated as an accurate modality of noninvasive motor mapping, TMS is less well studied. In this study, the authors compared the accuracy of TMS to both DCS and MEG imaging.
Methods:
Patients with tumors in proximity to primary motor cortex underwent preoperative TMS and MEG imaging for motor mapping. The patients subsequently underwent motor mapping via intraoperative DCS. The loci of maximal response were recorded from each modality and compared. Motor strength was assessed at 3 months postoperatively.
Results:
Transcranial magnetic stimulation and MEG imaging were performed on 24 patients. Intraoperative DCS yielded 8 positive motor sites in 5 patients. The median distance ± SEM between TMS and DCS motor sites was 2.13 ± 0.29 mm, and between TMS and MEG imaging motor sites was 4.71 ± 1.08 mm. In no patients did DCS motor mapping reveal a motor site that was unrecognized by TMS. Three of 24 patients developed new, early neurological deficit in the form of upper-extremity paresis. At the 3-month follow-up evaluation, 2 of these patients were significantly improved, experiencing difficulty only with fine motor tasks; the remaining patient had improvement to 4/5 strength. There were no deaths over the course of the study.
Conclusions:
Maps of the motor system generated with TMS correlate well with those generated by both MEG imaging and DCS. Negative TMS mapping also correlates with negative DCS mapping. Navigated TMS is an accurate modality for noninvasively generating preoperative motor maps.
