Thursday, 01 February 2018 14:46

International research team integrates patient data into brain simulation platform Featured

Scientists from the Charité Berlin, the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, from Toronto, Marseille and Barcelona have evolved the already existing brain simulation platform called "The Virtual Brain" by integrating patient measurement data.
 
The Virtual Brain Simulation Platform is an internationally recognized open source software platform for neuroscientists, which can be used to virtually analyse diseases such as epilepsy, stroke or Alzheimer's disease. It is based on so-called connectome network models. Connectomes represent the totality of the mutual relations of the nerve cells of the brain. The software can integrate a person's measurement data into existing patient-specific models thus simulate patient brains, among other things at the level of individual nerve cell connections, which cannot be measured in patients.
 
For the program extension, they recorded non-invasive electrocephalograms from patients, i. e. electrical currents of the brain, and integrated the data into the personalized computer model. Their work makes it now possible to find new individual differences between the brain functioning of healthy and sick people.
 
In a next step, larger groups of patients will be examined in order to investigate the mechanisms of epilepsy, stroke and dementia.
 
The new findings have been published in the journal eLife:
Michael Schirner, Anthony Randal McIntosh, Viktor K. Jirsa, Gustavo Deco & Petra Ritter (2018): Inferring multi-scale neural mechanisms with brain network modelling. Accepted manuscript, eLife January 8,2018. https://elifesciences.org/articles/28927