Modeling and Optimization in Transcranial Electrical Stimulation |
Transcranial electrical stimulation (TES), is also known as transcranial Direct and Alternating Current Stimulation (tDCS and tACS), depending on the nature of the applied current. Because the current levels are typically small (1-2 mA) and do not actually stimulate neuronal firing, the method is also termed Transcranial Electrical Neuromodulation (TEN). Even without stimulating neuronal firing, TES or TEN applications are capable to modify cortical excitability as well as brain rhythms and networks. TES is an emerging therapy for the treatment of neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression, Parkinson’s disease, anxiety and chronic pain. Research has also demonstrated that TES can be a valuable therapeutic tool in epilepsy, stroke rehabilitation, and other neurological and psychiatric conditions. It has also been proposed to enhance cognitive skills such as memory or learning. Despite these recent advances, there are ongoing debates on the clinical effectiveness of TES addressing many issues to be still resolved, in particular, substantial inter-subject response variability. Improving the specification of current density at the gyri- precise target for each individual subject, thereby computing the effective dosage individually, may be important to account for the considerable variability that is observed across individuals. In this regard, the anatomically faithful subject specific human head modeling in TES is becoming to play an increasingly more important role to facilitate and set the scene of the ultimate testing of TES clinical effectiveness in the future clinical trials. The central goal of this project is to built such high resolution anatomically accurate head models for the high performance computations in the forward and inverse optimization problems in TES.
Publications on the project:
Turovets, S., Volkov, V., Zherdetsky, A., Prokonina, E., Malony, A. A 3D BiCG Iterative Solver with the Fourier Preconditioner for the Anisotropic EIT / EEG forward Problem. Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, vol. 2014, Article ID 426902, 12 pages, 2014.
Salman, A., Malony, A., Turovets, S. , Volkov, V., Ozog , D. , Tucker, D. Concurrency in electrical neuroinformatics: parallel computation for studying the volume conduction of brain electrical fields in human head tissues. Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience 07/2015; DOI:10.1002/cpe.3510.
Guler S, Dannhauer M, Erem B, Macleod R, Tucker D, Turovets S, Luu P, Erdogmus D, Brooks DH. Optimization of focality and direction in dense electrode array transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). J Neural Eng. 2016 Jun;13(3).
Fernandez Corazza M, Turovets S, Luu P, Anderson E, Tucker D. Transcranial electrical neuromodulation based on the reciprocity principle. Frontiers in Psychiatry , 2016; 7(87).