Personalized brain imaging could help doctors better use magnetic stimulation to treat people with severe depression, a new study says.
Such brain imaging helped researchers better target accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation (aTMS), producing a reduction in depression symptoms and better treatment response rates, researchers reported June 24 in JAMA Psychiatry.
The results “provide prospective evidence that there may be clinical advantages to using functional imaging to guide accelerated TMS treatment,” said lead researcher Dr. Joseph Taylor, an endowed chair in psychiatry at Mass General Brigham in Boston.
“These findings are important as aTMS becomes more widely available and decisions are made about how to scale this intervention for patients with depression and other psychiatric illnesses,” he said in a news release.
TMS uses magnetic pulses applied outside a person’s skull to modulate their brain activity, researchers said in background notes. It’s been U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved for treating major depressive disorder in adults since 2008.
However, targeting the treatment has relied on scalp-based measurements up to now, which cannot account for differences in brain structure between individuals, researchers said.
For the new study, researchers tested whether accelerated TMS would be more potent against depression if it were directed using MRI scans instead. In accelerated TMS, patients receive multiple treatment sessions per day, which can condense several weeks of treatment into a single week.
“Neuroimaging has taught us a tremendous amount about the brain, but it has been difficult to show that imaging can directly improve patient care,” Taylor said.
For the new study, researchers recruited 40 people ages 22 to 80 with major depressive disorder that hadn’t responded to medication.
Patients were randomly assigned to receive accelerated TMS using either traditional scalp measurements or MRI targeting.
After one month, patients who received MRI-targeted treatment had significantly lower symptoms of depression than those who received usual TMS, results showed.
They also had higher response rates, 80 percent versus 60 percent, researchers said.
However, a larger trial is needed to confirm these results, researchers noted.
“It is important to address this knowledge gap because imaging adds cost and complexity to TMS treatment,” Taylor said. “In this study, our goal was to measure how much impact our approach to imaging-based targeting would have above and beyond conventional scalp-based targeting.”
RELATED: Accelerated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation May Relieve Depressive Symptoms
This study points toward a future where transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) could be more precisely tailored to each patient’s brain activity. Instead of relying on external scalp-based measurements alone, clinicians may eventually use brain imaging to better guide where stimulation is delivered.
For people living with treatment-resistant depression, this approach could mean more consistent symptom relief and improved response rates. While the findings are still early and need to be confirmed in larger trials, they suggest that depression treatment may become increasingly individualized—moving away from a one-size-fits-all model toward care that reflects each person’s unique brain patterns.
More information
The Mayo Clinic has more on transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression.
SOURCE: Mass General Brigham, news release, June 24, 2026
By subscribing, you consent to receive emails from BlackDoctor.com. You may unsubscribe at any time. Privacy Policy & Terms of Service.
