IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2014 May;22(3):441-52. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2014.2308997. Epub 2014 Feb 28.
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive brain stimulation technique able to induce long-lasting changes in cortical excitability that can benefit cognitive functioning and clinical treatment. In order to both better understand the mechanisms behind tDCS and possibly improve the technique, finite element models are used to simulate tDCS of the human brain. With the detailed anisotropic head model presented in this study, we provide accurate predictions of tDCS in the human brain for six of the practically most-used setups in clinical and cognitive research, targeting the primary motor cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, occipital cortex, and cerebellum. We present the resulting electric field strengths in the complete brain and introduce new methods to evaluate the effectivity in the target area specifically, where we have analyzed both the strength and direction of the field. For all cerebral targets studied, the currently accepted configurations produced sub-optimal field strengths. The configuration for cerebellum stimulation produced relatively high field strengths in its target area, but it needs higher input currents than cerebral stimulation does. This study suggests that improvements in the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation are achievable.
经颅直流电刺激（tDCS）是一种非侵入性脑刺激技术，能够诱导皮质兴奋性的持久变化，从而有益于认知功能和临床治疗。为了更好地理解 tDCS 的机制，并可能改进该技术，有限元模型被用于模拟人脑的 tDCS。利用本研究中提出的详细各向异性头部模型，我们针对原发性运动皮层、背外侧前额叶皮层、下额回、枕叶皮层和小脑这六个在临床和认知研究中实际应用最广泛的设置，对人类大脑中的 tDCS 进行了准确的预测。我们给出了在整个大脑中的电场强度，并引入了新的方法来专门评估目标区域的有效性，其中我们分析了场的强度和方向。对于所有研究的大脑目标，当前接受的配置产生了次优的场强。小脑刺激的配置在其目标区域产生了相对较高的场强，但它需要比大脑刺激更高的输入电流。本研究表明，经颅直流电刺激的效果可以得到改善。
