MRI-free OPM-MEG recovers medial temporal lobe theta during scene imagination

OPM-MEG in fifteen adults recovers medial temporal lobe theta attenuation (4–8 Hz) during scene imagination, peaking in the left parahippocampal gyrus and localizing to the left hippocampus (t = -3.55, p = 0.048).

• Why it matters: It is unclear whether deep medial temporal activity linked to scene construction can be recovered with wearable OPM-MEG and whether this requires an individual structural MRI.
• What they did: Participants completed a scene imagination task; after source reconstruction using a 12-parameter template warping coregistration pipeline, theta power (4–8 Hz) was compared against a counting baseline. In six participants, an individual T1-weighted MRI pipeline was also used to test localization consistency.
• The result: Theta attenuation during scene imagination was supported by a significant whole-brain FWE-corrected cluster mostly confined to the left medial temporal lobe, and template versus individual MRI approaches yielded similar topographies with peak centroids 3 mm apart.

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