Associate Professor Axel Thielscher receives DKK 5 mio from Lundbeckfonden to a project on brain stimulation. The project is called “Accurate Computational Dose Control for Transcranial Electric and Ultrasound Stimulation” and will run for the next four years.

Transcranial Brain Stimulation (TBS) has great potential to treat neuropsychiatric diseases. Although the individual anatomy of the brain and head determines how TBS engages the targeted brain region, current TBS approaches largely ignore anatomical differences across patients. This means that patients react very differently to the therapy. The project plans to use computational methods to estimate and optimize the stimulation patterns in the individual brain to make sure that each patient gets the most out of the therapy.

The plan is to substantially advance computational dosimetry for two powerful and complementary TBS techniques, Transcranial Electric Stimulation (TES) and Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Stimulation (TUS). The new dosing approaches will combine computational methods with short calibration measurements to predict the induced electrical fields (TES) or ultrasounds waves (TUS) with high accuracy on the individual level. This will help to stratify the stimulation dose across patients and to make the stimulation outcome less variable.