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.