Focused ultrasound thalamotomy for tremor treatment impacts the cerebello-thalamo-cortical network

Abstract High-intensity Magnetic Resonance-guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS) is a recent, non-invasive line of treatment for medication-resistant tremor. We used MRgFUS to produce small lesions in the thalamic ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM), an important node in the cerebello-thalamo-cortical tremor network, in 13 patients with tremor-dominant Parkinson’s disease or essential tremor. Significant tremor alleviation in the target hand ensued ( t (12) = 7.21, p < 0.001, two-tailed), which was strongly associated with the functional reorganization of the brain’s hand region with the cerebellum ( r = 0.91, p < 0.001, one - tailed). This reorganization potentially reflected a process of normalization, as there was a trend of increase in similarity between the hand cerebellar connectivity of the patients and that of a matched, healthy control group ( n = 48) after treatment. Control regions in the ventral attention, dorsal attention, default, and frontoparietal networks, in comparison, exhibited no association with tremor alleviation and no normalization. More broadly, changes in functional connectivity were observed in regions belonging to the motor, limbic, visual, and dorsal attention networks, largely overlapping with regions connected to the lesion targets. Our results indicate that MRgFUS is a highly efficient treatment for tremor, and that lesioning the VIM may result in the reorganization of the cerebello-thalamo-cortical tremor network.