Viswanathan, Ashwin

Abstract General anesthesia increasingly facilitates asleep deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery but suppresses spontaneous electrophysiological signals used to guide lead placement. Here, we investigated whether evoked resonant neural activity (ERNA), a stimulation-evoked biomarker of basal ganglia circuitry, remains informative during asleep DBS. We analyzed intraoperative recordings from a multisite cohort of 45 patients (86 hemispheres) undergoing subthalamic nucleus or globus pallidus internus DBS under awake and anesthetized conditions. Anesthesia markedly attenuated spontaneous beta and high-frequency oscillatory activity. Although ERNA amplitude was reduced at matched stimulation intensities, increasing stimulation current restored high-amplitude, spatially localized responses while preserving anatomical specificity. Across both targets, ERNA spatial distributions remained stable across awake and anesthetized states, co-localized with established motor-network biomarkers, and retrospectively identified electrode levels associated with the greatest postoperative therapeutic window. These retrospective findings position stimulation-evoked circuit interrogation as a complement to imaging for physiology-guided asleep DBS and as a candidate signal for contact prioritization. Prospective studies are warranted to determine whether ERNA-guided decisions improve placement, programming efficiency and clinical outcomes.