Julia Kroos: Patient-specific Modeling of the Cortical Spreading Depression

Abstract: Migraine is a common disease in present day population and a third of the migraine patients suffers from migraine aura, perceptual disturbances preceding the typical headache. Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD), a depolarisation wave that originates in the visual cortex and propagates across the cortex to the peripheral areas, has been suggested as a correlate of visual aura by several studies. Until now little is known about the origin of this phenomenon and possible curative treatments.

However, the complex and highly individual characteristics of the brain cortex suggest that the geometry might have a significant impact in supporting or contrasting the propagation of CSD. Accurate patient-specific computational models are thus fundamental to cope with the high variability in cortical geometries among individuals, but also with the conduction anisotropy induced in a given cortex by the complex neuronal organisation in the grey matter.

In order to study the role the geometry has in shaping the CSD, we introduce a reaction-diffusion model for extracellular potassium concentration on a personalized brain geometry obtained from MRI imaging. Patient-specific conductivity tensors are derived locally from Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data and provide detailed information about the anisotropy and the electrical conductivity properties of the cortical tissue. Additionally, we introduce a multiscale PDE-ODE model that couples the propagation of the depolarisation wave associated to CSD with a detailed electrophysiological model for the neuronal activity to capture both macroscopic and microscopic dynamics.