Measurements and Models of Electric Fields in the Human Brain During Transcranial Electric Stimulation

Overview

Journal Elife

Specialty Biology

Date 2017 Feb 8

PMID 28169833

Citations 248

Authors

Yu Huang

Anli A Liu

Belen Lafon

Daniel Friedman

Michael Dayan

Xiuyuan Wang

Marom Bikson

Werner K Doyle

Orrin Devinsky

Lucas C Parra

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Transcranial electric stimulation aims to stimulate the brain by applying weak electrical currents at the scalp. However, the magnitude and spatial distribution of electric fields in the human brain are unknown. We measured electric potentials intracranially in ten epilepsy patients and estimated electric fields across the entire brain by leveraging calibrated current-flow models. When stimulating at 2 mA, cortical electric fields reach 0.8 V/m, the lower limit of effectiveness in animal studies. When individual whole-head anatomy is considered, the predicted electric field magnitudes correlate with the recorded values in cortical ( = 0.86) and depth ( = 0.88) electrodes. Accurate models require adjustment of tissue conductivity values reported in the literature, but accuracy is not improved when incorporating white matter anisotropy or different skull compartments. This is the first study to validate and calibrate current-flow models with intracranial recordings in humans, providing a solid foundation to target stimulation and interpret clinical trials.

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