The integration of brain stimulation techniques with traditional neuroimaging network analysis provides a unique set of tools to potentially address all of these issues. By studying the distributed changes in brain activity that can be produced by focal transcranial brain stimulation, the connectivity pathways identified by traditional network analysis techniques can be validated in both normal subjects and in different disease states. Furthermore, by directly changing the activity of a single region in a controlled manner, brain stimulation techniques enable the identification of causal interactions between different cortical areas. As such, their use has added significantly to our understanding of the pathophysiology of cortical networks in various disease states.
