Human Intracranial Electrophysiology

Part of paid clinical trials in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Sponsor
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Study ID
NCT05529264
Status
Recruiting
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Conditions

Eligibility Criteria

Sex
ALL
Age
18 Years - N/A
Healthy Volunteers
Accepted

Interventions

  • Memory Tasks — OTHER
    Participants will be asked to view pictures and videos presented on a computer screen and will be asked to recall the details of presented pictures or videos sometime later.
  • Attention/arousal tasks — OTHER
    Participants will be asked to perform a continuous performance task, such as continuous addition of numbers. Additionally, participants may be presented with images and may be asked to rate the significance or arousal values for each image.
  • Language tasks — OTHER
    Participants will be asked to view pictures of actions or things and will be asked to name them. Participants may also be asked to read words or passages.
  • Visuospatial tasks — OTHER
    Participants will be asked to copy 3 dimensional designs or make judgements of angle size.
  • Auditory Tasks — OTHER
    Participants will be presented with short, approximately 8-minute clips of music from various genres ( i.e. classical, country, rock, etc.) with an attention task (modified sustained attention to response task) nested within each trial. Participants will receive approximately 8 music stimuli and 1 control stimulus (pink noise) twice over the course of two testing sessions ( 90 mins each). Additionally, participants will be asked to answer questions about their hearing, music preferences/training, and certain demographic information (age, handedness, and language proficiency).
  • Brain Stimulation — PROCEDURE
    A brain stimulator will be used to understand new functions of the brain. Participants will be presented with pictures on a computer screen and may be asked to tell researchers what is seen or remembered by participants. As pictures are viewed by the participants, the brain stimulator may be activated, which would not be something that would be felt by an individual participant.
  • Social Emotional Task — OTHER
    Participants will be asked to view presented pictures and videos of people engaged in social interaction. Additionally, participants will be presented with the standardized tasks that are designed to help the researchers with understanding the nature of emotions. Some of these images may be emotionally disturbing. If participants are not comfortable viewing such images, they will be asked to refrain from participation in this study.
  • Recording of facial expressions — OTHER
    Some participants may be asked permission to record the video of their facial expressions during performance of a research task. Generally, this will include only research tasks investigating brain representation of social/emotional information. Automated analysis of facial expression may be used in certain experiments to provide information on experience of emotional states such as happiness and sadness related to the images being presented.
  • Judgement/Impulsivity Task — OTHER
    Certain study participants may be enrolled into research tasks designed to activate regions important for judgment and impulse control. These tasks will present participants with choices of varying monetary rewards and ask them to make judgements to measure one's tendency to prefer immediate over delayed rewards.

Study Details

This study will enroll patients with epilepsy who are being evaluated for epilepsy surgery and have electrodes implanted in the brain and/or have electrodes on the scalp. Additionally, this study will recruit normal and online controls (participants who do not have epilepsy). Participants will be asked to participate in 1 to 2 (30-90 minutes) daily sessions designed to test aspects of human cognition such as memory, speech, language, feeling, movement, attention, sound perception, and emotions. Generally, this will involve working on a computer, looking at pictures or watching videos, and answering questions. Additionally, participants may be asked to be hooked up to additional equipment such as eye tracker, electrical stimulator, heart rate monitor, sweat monitor or other non-invasive equipment. The overall aim of this study is to use human intracranial electrophysiology (the recording of the electrical activity of the human brain) to study localization and function of the human brain.

Key Dates

Start date
Jan 17, 2023
Status verified
Jan 2026
Primary completion
Aug 1, 2027
Completion
Aug 1, 2032

Study Design

Enrollment
175 participants (estimated)
Allocation
NON_RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE

Arms

  • Experimental: Invasive EEG (electrodes are implanted in a participant's brain)
    Patients with intracranial electrodes (electrodes are implanted in a participant's brain) undergoing pre-surgical evaluation for clinical reasons will be asked to participate in various study tasks with the recording of intracranial EEG (recording of brain waves via electrodes implanted in a participant's brain) during these tasks.
  • Experimental: Scalp EEG (electrodes are placed on a participant's scalp)
    Patients with non-invasive scalp electrodes who are admitted to the hospital for clinical reasons will be asked to participate in various study tasks with the recording of their EEG (recording of brain waves via electrodes attached to a participant's scalp) during these tasks.
  • Active Comparator: Normal Controls
    Normal controls will be recruited from family members of patients, from advertisements, or from online tools. There will be no EEG recordings obtained from these participants.
  • Active Comparator: Online Controls
    Certain control subjects will be recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. These participants will be given their task on the online platform using Qualtric survey function. The task design will be identical to normal controls who are recruited in-person, with the exception of identifiers. There will be no EEG recordings obtained from these participants.

Primary Outcome Measure

Using scalp and intracranial EEG, measure changes in electrical activity of the human brain associated with memory. [ Time Frame: Evaluated for each patient during monitoring period of approximately 2 weeks. ]

Central Contacts

Locations (1)

FacilityCityStateZIPSite coordinators
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical CenterLebanonNew Hampshire03776
Krzysztof A Bujarski, MD
[email protected]
603 650-5104
Gina Kersey
[email protected]
(603) 650-0260
Krzysztof A Bujarski, MD (PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR)

Find similar trials in Lebanon, NH

By condition
Epilepsy
By specialty
NeurologyBrain disorders
By research site
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center· Lebanon, NH

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