About the Project
Brain stimulation has a staggering range of potential benefits, from alleviating symptoms of mental and neurological illness to enhancing cognitive abilities. The field is currently crippled by issues in reproducibility and individual variation, in part due to a lack of understanding of underlying mechanisms. A novel approach to identifying variability and mechanisms is to build accurate and testable computational models. This project will create a predictive model to inform experimentalists and clinicians which will be tested on preexisting data.
Brain stimulation can be invasive through implanted electrodes. This is an option, for example, for Parkinson’s disease patients or for epilepsy patients where drugs are not working. However, non-invasive techniques allow us to change brain activity without using implants. These techniques use electric, magnetic, or ultrasound signals to interact with brain activity and to change their dynamics [1]. Over the last years, we developed a simulation of brain tissue: VERTEX (http://www.vertexsimulator.org/). This system is using parallel computing on computer clusters to simulate up to 500,000 neurons [2].
Extending VERTEX to interact with information about the anatomy of individual subjects will result in a planning system for non-invasive brain stimulation. The student will use high-performance computing to simulate effects on larger amounts of brain tissue. The task will include optimization of code in order to simulate effects in a short amount of time so that different treatment options can be evaluated. The project will also include the development of workflows and user interfaces to include neuroimaging information about the brain of individual patients. As a result, the system allows to predict the effect of different brain stimulation techniques on an individual subject in the hospital.
This project will be in collaboration with Soterix Medical [3], the largest manufacturer of non-invasive brain stimulation devices, and will include visit to its research division at New York. Furthermore, we will test how the planning software of this PhD project can interact with the Soterix planning software for which we were provided a free license for testing. Finally, Soterix is providing us with experimental data of non-invasive brain stimulation outcomes in humans and non-human primates that can be compared with computational models.
[1] Wang et al. Computational Modelling of Neurostimulation in Brain Diseases. Progress in Brain Research, 2015
[2] www.vertexsimulator.org
[3] http://www.soterixmedical.com
Funding Notes
This studentship is part of the MRC Discovery Medicine North (DiMeN) partnership and is funded for 3.5 years. Including the following financial support:
Tax-free maintenance grant at the national UK Research Council rate
Full payment of tuition fees at the standard UK/EU rate
Research training support grant (RTSG)
Travel allowance for attendance at UK and international meetings
Opportunity to apply for Flexible Funds for further training and development
Please carefully read eligibility requirements and how to apply on our website, then use the link on this page to submit an application: http://www.dimen.org.uk/how-to-apply/application-overview
References
Sinha N, Dauwels J, Wang Y, Kaiser M, Cash SS, Westover MB, Taylor PN.
Predicting neurosurgical outcomes in focal epilepsy patients using computational modelling. Brain, 140(2):319-332, 2017.
Hutchings F, Han CE, Keller S, Weber B, Taylor PN, Kaiser M. Predicting Surgery Targets in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy through Structural Connectome Based Simulations. PLOS Computational Biology 11:e1004642, 2015.
Tomsett RJ, Ainsworth M, Thiele A, Sanayei M, Chen X, Gieselmann A, Whittington MA, Cunningham MO, Kaiser M. Virtual Electrode Recording Tool for EXtracellular potentials (VERTEX): Comparing multi-electrode recordings from simulated and biological mammalian cortical tissue. Brain Structure and Function, 220: 2333-2353, 2015.
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