Mapping human brain topography to heart rhythms: an SEEG study

作者：Xiaopeng Wang, Haoxun Yang, Yueyang Cheng, Shujia Liu, Guangyuan Jin, Zichen Qiao, Lei Qi, Siyi Wang, Junliang Ge, Dongmei Hu, Hai Tang, Runshi Gao, Cuiping Xu, Xiaohua Zhang, Di Wang, Xiangyu Xue, Anqi Dai, Wenbo Zhao, Tao Yu, Yuping Wang, Bailu Si, Guoguang Zhao, Liankun Ren · 发表于：Cardiovascular Research · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1093/cvr/cvaf099 · 被引用次数：10 · 研究领域：Functional Brain Connectivity Studies、Epilepsy research and treatment、EEG and Brain-Computer Interfaces

AIMS: The interplay between the heart and brain has been a subject of interest for centuries, as dysfunction in this interaction is implicated in various cardiovascular diseases and neurological disorders. Despite this advancement, there is currently a limited understanding of the mechanisms that the human brain communicates with heart rhythms. Here, we aim to characterize the human brain processing of heart rhythms and map human brain topography to heart rhythms. METHODS AND RESULTS: We investigated how the human brain processes heart rhythms in a cohort of 54 drug-resistant epilepsy patients who simultaneously recorded electrocardiography and stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) during pre-surgical evaluation. Intracranial heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) derived from averaging brain responses time-locked to R peaks of heartbeats in consecutive resting-state SEEG epochs, were characterized in terms of their morphology and spatiotemporal distribution across the brain. The analysis revealed a complex brain topography to heart rhythms that includes the anticipated bilateral thalamus, insula, amygdala, and anterior cingulate cortex, while also extending to the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, supramarginal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. Employing an Eigen microstates approach, we disentangled two prominent components of the HEPs network in the time window from 100 to 400 ms post-R-peak, reflecting early (100-250 ms) and delayed (250-400 ms) processing pathways. Furthermor...