Background: Today 15-20% of people who suffer from depression do not manage to remit with drugs (drug-resistant depression, DRD). This situation involves significant health and human costs. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is intended, by placing brain electrodes, to modulate brain limbic circuits and improve the mood of these people. Multiple studies support this technique. However, there are imaging milestones to be achieved in this field.

Objective: To isolate the subcortical and cortical brain networks associated with clinical improvement of patients with DRD undergoing neuromodulation surgery. Knowing such brain networks would allow planning future surgeries on those circuits in a specific and efficient way.

Methodology: Normative cerebral connectomes and structural image data from people with DRD intervened by means of DBS will be used to develop a fiber-filtering processing and correlation with clinical variables a long term (5 years after surgery).

This project will be done in Hospital Sant Pau in the Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery Neuro-Oncology group