ArticleScientific reports2020
A framework to assess the impact of number of trials on the amplitude of motor evoked potentials.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- On the reliability of motor evoked potentials in hand muscles of healthy adults: a systematic review.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Intensity-Dependent Effects of Low-Frequency Subthreshold rTMS on Primary Motor Cortex Excitability and Interhemispheric Inhibition in Elderly Participants: A Randomized Trial.Neurorehabilitation and neural repair · 2025Trial
- Intra- and Inter-Session Reliability of Average- and Trial-Level Motor Evoked Potential Amplitudes.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Post-Stroke Motor Fatigability: Defining and Studying the Impairments That Emerge During Prolonged Motor Tasks.Neurorehabilitation and neural repair · 2026Review
- Anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction is associated with increased corticospinal excitability and rate of force development.BMC sports science, medicine & rehabilitation · 2026Article
- Re-evaluating transcranial static magnetic stimulation (tSMS): No inhibitory effects on motor cortex across hemispheres.Clinical neurophysiology practice · 2026Article
- Precision, accuracy, and reliability of a threshold hunting method for transcranial magnetic stimulation.Clinical neurophysiology practice · 2026Article
- Motor cortical excitability and inhibition are differentially modulated by aerobic exercise intensity.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Motor Cortex Disinhibition Correlates with Olfactory Dysfunction in Parkinson's Disease.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2025Article
- The Influence of Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation on the Excitability of the Unstimulated Contralateral Primary Motor Cortex.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Evaluating diaphragm motor response variability in electric and magnetic phrenic nerve stimulations during passive expiration.Clinical neurophysiology practice · 2025Article
- Motor Learning in a Complex Motor Task Is Unaffected by Three Consecutive Days of Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Non-Dominant Hemisphere Excitability Is Unaffected during and after Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of the Dominant Hemisphere.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Exploring the Influence of Inter-Trial Interval on the Assessment of Short-Interval Intracortical Inhibition.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Stability of steady-state visual evoked potential contrast response functions.Psychophysiology · 2024Article
- The Influence of Different Inter-Trial Intervals on the Quantification of Intracortical Facilitation in the Primary Motor Cortex.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Motor potentials evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation: interpreting a simple measure of a complex system.The Journal of physiology · 2023Review
- Decoding firings of a large population of human motor units from high-density surface electromyogram in response to transcranial magnetic stimulation.The Journal of physiology · 2023Article
- Corticospinal excitability and conductivity are related to the anatomy of the corticospinal tract.Brain structure & function · 2022Article
- Hasty sensorimotor decisions rely on an overlap of broad and selective changes in motor activity.PLoS biology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
The amplitude of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a common yet highly variable measure of corticospinal excitability. The tradeoff between maximizing the number of trials and minimizing experimental time remains a hurdle. It is therefore important to establish how many trials should be used. The aim of this study is not to provide rule-of-thumb answers that may be valid only in specific experimental conditions, but to offer a more general framework to inform the decision about how many trials to use under different experimental conditions. Specifically, we present a set of equations that show how the number of trials affects single-subject MEP amplitude, population MEP amplitude, hypothesis testing and test-retest reliability, depending on the variability within and between subjects. The equations are derived analytically, validated with Monte Carlo simulations, and representatively applied to experimental data. Our findings show that the minimum number of trials for estimating single-subject MEP amplitude largely depends on the experimental conditions and on the error considered acceptable by the experimenter. Conversely, estimating population MEP amplitude and hypothesis testing are markedly more dependent on the number of subjects than on the number of trials. These tools and results help to clarify the impact of the number of trials in the design and reproducibility of past and future experiments.
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