Reorganization of Motor Representations in Patients with Brain Lesions: A Navigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study

This is an explorative study applying presurgical navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (nTMS) to investigate the spatial distributions of motor sites to reveal tumor-induced brain plasticity in patients with brain tumors. We analyzed nTMS-based motor maps derived from presurgical mapping of 100 patients with motor eloquently located brain tumors (tumors in the frontal lobe, the precentral gyrus [PrG], the postcentral gyrus [PoG], the remaining parietal lobe, or the temporal lobe). Based on these motor maps, we systematically investigated changes in motor evoked potential (MEP) counts among 4 gyri (PrG, PoG, medial frontal gyrus, and superior frontal gyrus) between subgroups of patients according to the tumor location in order to depict the tumor’s influence on reorganization. When comparing patients with different tumor locations, high MEP counts were elicited less frequently by stimulating the PrG in patients with tumors directly affecting the PrG (p < 0.05). Still, in more than 50% of these patients, the MEP counts elicited by stimulating the PrG were higher than average, indicating robust motor representations within the primary motor cortex. In contrast, patients with PoG and parietal tumors primarily showed high MEP counts when stimulating the PoG (p < 0.10). The functional reorganization is not likely to induce a shift of motor function from the PrG to adjacent regions but rather leads to a reorganization within anatomical constraints, such as of the PoG. Thus, presurgical nTMS-based motor mapping sensitively depicted the tumor-induced plasticity of the motor cortex.