Meeting #8: Coordinating student TMS research projects; 29th August 2025, 14:00 BST (GMT+1)

[TheHandLab]

Dear all,

at the last TMSMultiLab meeting Roisin @RMcM-Physiol led a discussion of how to think about and deal with the 'baseline' period before a TMS pulse. If you're recording EMG and using the baseline activity to include, exclude, or otherwise co-vary with your EMG/MEP data following TMS, then it really matters. We learnt that signals as small as ~5 microvolts (measured as the RMS of the pre-TMS baseline) can predict the occurrence of MEPs near threshold. Given that researchers often exclude EMG baseline data for being over 25 or over 50 (and I am currently reviewing a paper where the cut-off is >100) microvolts, this seems... Important!

Roisin has kindly shared her presentation here:
https://github.com/TMSMultiLab/TMSMultiLab/blob/main/Meetings/2025_07_25_McMackin_R_EMG_baseline.pdf

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The next TMSMultiLab meeting is in 2 weeks time: last Friday of August (29th) at 14:00 BST, at the permalink:

https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86201752364?pwd=LnSPVYuBDGa5BEbFNy5SmENqcDsvpC.1

With the new academic year only a month away - striking dread into the chest of every faculty member - the topic will be: how can we co-ordinate or otherwise use undergraduate and masters projects to advance the aims of TMSMultiLab?

If you supervise projects using TMS (as professor, lecturer, postdoc, or phd student), then come along and discuss what we can do together. TMSMultiLab could aim - for example - to answer one question (and write one paper) every year. It could be as simple as collecting biometric data, resting motor thresholds, or results from particular protocols across a range of test locations.

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Finally: a point of admin. I have recently learnt how to use github properly, and am now doing 'push' and 'pull' requests from my own fork of the repository into the main TMSMultiLab branch. Every week or so I will upload my code updates into the repository. You may receive email notifications from github when this happens. (I believe you can turn them off in your settings.) Even better: leave them on, learn how github works, ask me to explain anything you need, and start contributing to the codebase :-)

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Please forward this email to any individual who may be interested in joining (but not to mailing lists please, to avoid spam). Please think of someone who would appreciate this and invite them!

see you soon,
Nick