Optimal Pre-Experimental Coil Sequence Selection for TMS Motor Mapping

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) motor mapping increasingly relies on electric-field (E-field) modeling to localize cortical targets, but many candidate coil placements induce highly redundant cortical patterns. We frame prospective coil-sequence design as a subset-selection problem and compare farthest-point sampling, determinant-based objectives, and related controls in virtual mapping experiments across 12 realistic head models. Across convergence, matrix-diagnostic, and manifold-coverage analyses, the best-performing objectives combined low between-stimulation redundancy with preserved inter-element separability on the cortex; objectives that maximized one of these at the expense