Mood variations decoded from multi-site intracranial human brain activity

• Published in: Nature biotechnology Vol. 36; no. 10; pp. 954 - 961
• Main Authors: Sani, Omid G, Yang, Yuxiao, Lee, Morgan B, Dawes, Heather E, Chang, Edward F, Shanechi, Maryam M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Nature Publishing Group 01.11.2018
• Subjects: Analysis; Brain; Decoders; Decoding; Drug therapy; Dynamic models; Emotional disorders; Epilepsy; Feasibility studies; Human performance; Human subjects; Medical imaging; Mental disorders; Modelling; Mood; Mood disorders; Nervous system diseases; Neural coding; Neurophysiology; Sparsity; Variation; United States
• ISSN: 1087-0156; 1546-1696
• DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4200

The ability to decode mood state over time from neural activity could enable closed-loop systems to treat neuropsychiatric disorders. However, this decoding has not been demonstrated, partly owing to the difficulty of modeling distributed mood-relevant neural dynamics while dealing with the sparsity of mood state measurements. Here we develop a modeling framework to decode mood state variations from multi-site intracranial recordings in seven human subjects with epilepsy who self-reported their mood state intermittently over multiple days. We built dynamic neural encoding models of mood state and corresponding decoders for each individual and demonstrated that mood state variations over time can be decoded from neural activity. Across subjects, the decoders largely recruited neural signals from limbic regions, whose spectro-spatial features were tuned to mood variations. The dynamic models also provided an analytical tool to compute the timescales of the decoded mood state. These results provide an initial line of evidence indicating the feasibility of mood state decoding.