Neuronavigation-free and MRI-free Localization of Deep Brain Targets

Abstract Emerging non-invasive brain stimulation modalities, including transcranial focused ultrasound and transcranial interferential stimulation, offer the promise of safely and non-invasively modulating deep brain structures. Accurate targeting of these regions typically involves subject-specific MRI, limiting widespread deployment. Here, we introduce an MRI-free, neuronavigation-free method for localizing deep brain targets using only three simple scalp measurements. These measures define an affine transformation that maps the MNI152 standard head model to an individual’s head geometry. We evaluated our approach on 50 healthy adults, comparing our model◻predicted coordinates against ground-truth coordinates obtained via MRI-based nonlinear normalization. Across ten deep brain targets, our method achieved a mean localization error of 3.82 mm demonstrating a more accessible and cost-efficient alternative than MRI- or neuronavigation-based approaches.