Congruence between BOLD activation pattern and the maximal suppression effect by TMS during a simple visual discrimination task

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation can interfere with the neural processing in a brain area-of-interest. How well the spatial pattern of TMS interference coincides with the activation pattern observed in fMRI was evaluated. The coil position at which TMS suppressed the perception of a visual stimulus was determined and compared with the stimulus-related BOLD activation. The TMS effect consistently occurred over a specific subpart of the fMRI activation. While fMRI is capable of characterizing the general pattern of brain areas activated in a certain task, TMS has the potential to specifically localize those areas being most critical for the task