Julia Kroos: Personalized Simulation of the Cortical Spreading Depression

Abstract: Migraine is a prevailing disease in present day population. Cortical spreading depression (CSD) – a depolarisation wave originating from the visual cortex and propagating across the cortex – has been suggested, by several studies, as a correlate of visual aura, a neurological phenomenon preceding migraine and causing perceptual disturbance. As of today, little is known about the mechanisms that can trigger or stop such phenomenon and possible curative treatments. The complex and highly individual characteristics of the brain cortex suggest a significant impact of its geometry in supporting or contrasting the propagation of CSD. Thus, accurate patient-specific computational models are essential 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 brain geometry has in shaping CSD, we introduce a mean field model for neural excitation, distributed over a personalized brain geometry obtained from MRI imaging. Patient-specific conductivity tensors are derived locally from Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data.