ABSTRACT
The current era of functional neuromodulation offers immense opportunity for minimally invasive surgical treatment of certain debilitating neurologic and psychiatric disorders. As its name implies, the goal of functional neuromodulation is to alter or “modulate” neuronal activity so as to restore function. While pharmacology and invasive surgical approaches (e.g., targeted ablation of brain tissue) can be considered “neuromodulatory,” the term today is generally applied to techniques that alter local and distal neuronal activity through electrical pulses emitted by implanted electrodes in a neural target site. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), the most common of these approaches, involves implanting electrodes into targeted structures located deep within the brain.
