Human Intracranial EEG: Promises and Limitations

By J. Parvizi, Sabine Kastner. Nature Neuroscience, 2018

535 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), also known as electrocorticography when using subdural grid electrodes or stereotactic EEG when using depth electrodes, is blossoming in various fields of human neuroscience. In this article, we highlight the potentials of iEEG in exploring functions of the human brain while also considering its limitations. The iEEG signal provides anatomically precise information about the selective engagement of neuronal populations at the millimeter scale and the temporal dynamics of their engagement at the millisecond scale. If several nodes of a given network are monitored simultaneously with implanted electrodes, the iEEG signals can also reveal information about functional interactions within and across networks during different stages of neural computation. As such, human iEEG can complement other methods of neuroscience beyond simply replicating what is already known, or can be known, from noninvasive lines of research in humans or from invasive recordings in nonhuman mammalian brains. The authors argue that intracranial EEG recordings in humans add unique information beyond invasive recordings in animal models and noninvasive human research, including anatomically precise dynamics and network interactions of neuronal populations.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8cbd468998ba6c93ba82e95cde50c8d288ed74e

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

The neural architecture of language: Integrative modeling converges on predictive processing (2020, background): “…internal structure of the human language network, for which intracranial recording approaches with high spatial and temporal resolution may prove critical (Mukamel & Fried, 2012; Parvizi & Kastner, 2018), would allow us to guide and constrain models of tissue-mapped mechanistic language processing.”
A modular and flexible pipeline for intraoperative electrode reconstruction and localization in patients with brain lesions (2026, unknown): “As a result, subdural electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-EEG (sEEG) represent the current gold standards for analyzing human cortical dynamics (Lachaux et al., 2003; Parvizi and Kastner, 2018).”
Quilting the Brain: Whole-Brain iEEG Reconstruction via Incomplete Observation Linear Mixed Models (2026, unknown): “…or the regular voxel grids of fMRI, iEEG sampling strategies are dictated entirely by clinical needs, typically used for presurgical evaluation in drug-resistant epilepsy patients to de(cid:28)ne the seizure onset zone (SOZ) and functional cortex (Parvizi and Kastner, 2018; Mercier et al., 2022).”
Propofol-induced loss of responsiveness reorganizes cortical traveling waves in the human brain (2026, unknown): “Accordingly, no additional analyses to exclude epileptiform activity were performed, consistent with established protocols for using epileptic recordings to study healthy human brain function 28–30 .”
Temporal order of activations and interactions during arithmetic calculations measured by intracranial electrophysiological recordings in the human brain (2026, unknown): “Several limitations, inherent to the iEEG method 63 , stem from the uneven and sparse distribution of the intracranial electrode contacts in the brain and a relatively small and heterogeneous cohort, consisting of epilepsy patients.”
Echoes of Pink Noise: A Hypothesized Mechanism for Enhancing Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation with Auditory Stimulation (2025, unknown): “Future studies (see also Box 3) could utilize intracranial EEG (iEEG) in patients with epilepsy (Mercier et al. 2022; Parvizi and Kastner 2018), employing depth electrodes to capture both field potential and neuronal firing during natural sleep.”
Neural correlates of perceptual consciousness from within: A narrative review of human intracranial research (2025, unknown): “Recorded signals can be contaminated by epileptic activity, and neuroplasticity can occur following cortical damage caused by epileptic seizures ( Parvizi and Kastner, 2018 ).”
Distributed theta networks support the control of working memory: Evidence from scalp and intracranial EEG (2025, unknown): “First, while iEEG offers superior spatial resolution, its coverage is constrained by clinical needs for seizure localization and varies across patients, restricting consistent sampling across individuals (Parvizi & Kastner, 2018).”
Intracranial Recordings in Epilepsy: an Approach to Understanding the Neural Mechanisms of Social Cognition (2025, unknown): “Most are implanted in limbic and frontal regions as the majority of patients are suspected of either temporal or frontal lobe epilepsy (TLE/FLE) [25], and therefore, will overlap with social cognition networks.”
Naturalistic Audiovisual Illusions Reveal the Cortical Sites Involved in the Multisensory Processing of Speech (2025, unknown): “We used intracranial EEG and a mass univariate analysis approach based on linear regression to resolve the cortical processing of these complex, naturalistic stimuli with optimal resolution and signal- to-noise ratio at the single-trial level (Parvizi and Kastner 2018).”
Theta oscillations between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala support dynamic representations of threat and safety (2025, unknown): “…patients experienced epileptic seizures during data collection, interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) could transiently impair cognitive function, interact with relevant physiological activity, and reduce the ability to detect cognitive processes (Mercier et al., 2022; Parvizi & Kastner, 2018).”
Functional segregation of rostral and caudal hippocampus in associative memory (2025, unknown): “While neuroimaging can anatomically map activation patterns, only intracranial neurophysiological recordings can capture the modulation of local oscillatory neuronal activity (Buzsáki et al., 2012; Johnson and Knight, 2015; Parvizi and Kastner, 2018; Youngerman et al., 2019).”