Cho Young Sun, Suh Hyun Sang, Lee Won Hee, Kim Tae-Seong
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Gyeonggi, Republic of Korea.
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2010;2010:3113-6. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2010.5626096.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technique for brain stimulation using rapidly changing magnetic fields generated by coils. It has been established as an effective stimulation technique to treat patients suffering from damaged brain functions. Although TMS is known to be painless and noninvasive, it can also be harmful to the brain by incorrect focusing and excessive stimulation which might result in seizure. Therefore there is ongoing research effort to elucidate and better understand the effect and mechanism of TMS. Lately Boundary element method (BEM) and Finite element method (FEM) have been used to simulate the electromagnetic phenomenon of TMS. However, there is a lack of general tools to generate the models of TMS due to some difficulties in realistic modeling of the human head and TMS coils. In this study, we have developed a toolbox through which one can generate high-resolution FE TMS models. The toolbox allows creating FE models of the head with isotropic and anisotropic electrical conductivities in five different tissues of the head and the coils in 3D. The generated TMS model is importable to FE software packages such as ANSYS for further and efficient electromagnetic analysis. We present a set of demonstrative results of realistic simulation of TMS with our toolbox.
经颅磁刺激（TMS）是一种利用线圈产生的快速变化磁场来刺激大脑的技术。它已被确立为一种治疗脑功能受损患者的有效刺激技术。尽管已知TMS无痛且无创，但不正确的聚焦和过度刺激可能会导致癫痫发作，从而对大脑造成伤害。因此，目前正在进行研究以阐明并更好地理解TMS的效果和机制。最近，边界元法（BEM）和有限元法（FEM）已被用于模拟TMS的电磁现象。然而，由于在真实模拟人头和TMS线圈方面存在一些困难，缺乏生成TMS模型的通用工具。在本研究中，我们开发了一个工具箱，通过它可以生成高分辨率的有限元TMS模型。该工具箱允许在头部的五种不同组织中创建具有各向同性和各向异性电导率的头部有限元模型以及三维线圈模型。生成的TMS模型可导入到诸如ANSYS等有限元软件包中，以进行进一步的高效电磁分析。我们展示了使用我们的工具箱对TMS进行真实模拟的一组示范结果。
