Review on Biophysical Modelling and Simulation Studies for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

TL;DR

This review discusses advances in computational modeling for transcranial magnetic stimulation, emphasizing the importance of anatomical accuracy, personalized approaches, and understanding TMS effects at the cellular level for improved clinical outcomes.

Contribution

It summarizes recent progress in TMS dosimetry, highlighting the integration of anatomical data, neural modeling, and personalized stimulation prediction methods.

Findings

High consensus on detailed cortical folding importance

Accurate cerebrospinal fluid modeling is crucial

Personalized TMS predictions are emerging

Abstract

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technique for noninvasively stimulating a brain area for therapeutic, rehabilitation treatments and neuroscience research. Despite our understanding of the physical principles and experimental developments pertaining to TMS, it is difficult to identify the exact brain target as the generated dosage exhibits a non-uniform distribution owing to the complicated and subject-dependent brain anatomy and the lack of biomarkers that can quantify the effects of TMS in most cortical areas. Computational dosimetry has progressed significantly and enables TMS assessment by computation of the induced electric field (the primary physical agent known to activate the brain neurons) in a digital representation of the human head. In this review, TMS dosimetry studies are summarised, clarifying the importance of the anatomical and human biophysical parameters and computational methods. This review shows that there is a high consensus on the importance of a detailed cortical folding representation and an accurate modelling of the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid. Recent studies have also enabled the prediction of individually optimised stimulation based on magnetic resonance imaging of the patient/subject and have attempted to understand the temporal effects of TMS at the cellular level by incorporating neural modelling. These efforts, together with the fast deployment of personalised TMS computations, will permit the adoption of TMS dosimetry as a standard procedure in clinical procedures.