electrocorticography

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a technique for recording the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex by placing an electrode grid or strip directly on the exposed surface of the brain — on the pia mater — during neurosurgical procedures; ECoG offers spatial resolution and signal quality far superior to scalp EEG because the electrodes are separated from neural sources only by the thin pia mater rather than the skull and multiple tissue layers, while being less invasive than penetrating microelectrode arrays that penetrate brain tissue; ECoG is used clinically in epilepsy surgery to map seizure onset zones and eloquent cortex before surgical resection, and in research settings to decode speech, motor intentions, and cognitive states from the neural signal; the high-gamma frequency band (70–150 Hz) in ECoG has proven particularly informative for decoding intended movements and speech, enabling BCI applications that achieve high communication rates; fully implantable chronic ECoG systems represent an increasingly important direction in BCI development

Examples

• Electrocorticography recordings from motor cortex allowed researchers to decode intended hand movements.
• The epilepsy team used electrocorticography to locate the seizure focus before surgery.