ECE Faculty Seminar: Sumientra Rampersad

Faculty Seminar: Is temporal interference the key to noninvasive deep brain stimulation? Answers from simulation studies in mice and humans.

Sumientra Rampersad

Location: Zoom Link

Abstract: Transcranial current stimulation (tCS) has been used for two decades to noninvasively investigate and influence brain function in both healthy volunteers and clinical populations. While many positive effects have been found, the goals of high focality, accurate targeting and deep stimulation are yet to be achieved. Transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS) is a new form of tCS that might improve the method on all three fronts. tTIS uses two alternating currents to create an amplitude-modulated electric field that can peak deep in the brain. A recent murine study showed promising effects of tTIS and concluded that the technique may be used as a noninvasive form of deep brain stimulation in humans, but results from human experiments have not yet been published. In this talk I will present results of finite element simulations with realistic head models to investigate the electric fields induced by tTIS in the brain, comparing results in murine and human head models for tTIS and conventional tCS. Due to the nonlinear nature of tTIS, conventional methods to optimize tCS fields for a specific brain target cannot be used. I will present two nonconvex optimization methods for tTIS and compare their efficiency and results. Finally, I will discuss the implications of the results of these simulation and optimization studies for potential applications of tTIS in humans.

Bio: Sumientra Rampersad is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, where she leads the Brain Stimulation & Simulation Lab. Dr. Rampersad’s research aims to improve understanding of the working mechanisms behind neuromodulation and improve its application using computational methods and experiments with human subjects. She investigates invasive (ECoG, sEEG) and noninvasive (tCS, TMS) brain stimulation, as well as peripheral stimulation, and is especially interested in bridging the gap between modeling and experiments through model-based experimentation. Her research in collaboration with various academic and clinical partners has been awarded funding by NIA, NINDS and NIMH. Dr. Rampersad was previously a research scientist in Northeastern’s Cognitive Systems Lab and obtained her PhD at the Radboud University Donders Institute in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.