Want to try out Montage Explorer? Click here!



One of the hardest parts of using brain stimulation is deciding where to stimulate. I know this because I’ve received several dozen emails about it.





Some of which are easier to answer than others



Therefore, one of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is system to help people find brain stimulation parameters (montages, in tDCS parlance).





There are established resources for this (such as the site tdcsplacments, which lists montages by use) but these often leave a lot to be desired. One of the main issues with a traditional montage site is that the “montages” are usually based on just one or a few studies, showing an effect of stimulation on some particular cognitive function. This is a handy way to find studies, but it suffers from a couple of drawbacks:





1. Most published research findings are false. Because a typical montage site provides only one or two articles showing the effectiveness of the montage, it’s impossible to judge how reliable the effect actually is (i.e. studies that use the same montage but show no effects are typically not reported)





2. .Describing something as a montage for a specific purpose (I.e. “accelerated learning” ) greatly overstates the specificity of the montage. Most montages affect a large portion of the brain of the brain and a whole host of cognitive functions, including possible detrimental effects. However, because individual studies usually only examine the effects of stimulation on one or two variables of interest, this is not communicated well by organizing, montages “by function” and can lead to (possibly unwanted) side effects being overlooked.





3. . It’s often difficult to find the original sources for claims made about montages, and claims presented are often overly vague or based on over-interpretations or misinterpretations of the original research. (many of the montages on tdcsplacements, for instance, link only to a review article that provides very little information on the protocols used or how effects were assessed).





S o how to deal with these issues? Many of them are basically intractable to do manually without a staff of people reading and reviewing articles (investigating all the effects of prefrontal stimulation is a daunting undertaking, for instance). But manual analysis isn’t the only way to do it.









The goal of Montage Explorer is slightly different from that of a traditional montage

w

ebsite.

While most of these sites attempt to provide details one a montage used in one or two studies, the goal of Montage Explorer is to provide an aggregate view and summary of

all

the research on a particular montage (including side effects that are discovered in studies by other authors and “null results” where an effect fails to replicate) and provide access to the original results and publications,

using automated analysis of articles published on noninvasive brain stimulation



What is this good for? Here are some of the cool things you can do with it:





S earch by effect: Like most montage sites, Montage Explorer can find studies relevant to a specific effect (like memory). Because in our case this is accomplished by searching through the descriptions and keywords of articles, it can also find categories of things that might not be featured on a traditional montage site (i.e. montages for aphasia)



Summarize protocols: When you submit a search, Montage Explorer will automatically extract the methods and stimulation parameters (electrode locations, stimulation intensity, stimulation duration, and electrode size) and display the commonly used parameters for stimulation relevant to that search.



Find other effects of montages: While you can search for montages that achieve a specific effect(say, improving mood), you can also search using any other stimulation parameter. This allows you to do things like showing all the reported effects of stimulating a brain region, rather than limiting results to a specific topic.



Review original literature: Whenever you submit a search, all of the results returned by Montage Explorer are referenced to the original paper reporting them. These papers can be accsessed through the publisher’s website or through sci-hub.org, a service which provides access for people without a subscription to the journal. Montage Explorer also extracts reported results directly from the relevant papers and displays them on the search results page.



The goal for Montage Explorer is to include pretty much all the relevant brain stimulation literature in its database, and to reflect recently published studies (the database is not yet at this level of comprehensiveness, but it is pretty hefty and growing!)



