Event:

In inductive neuronal stimulation, brief magnetic field pulses (up to 3 T for up to 1 ms) can noninvasively excite neuronal populations. The characteristics of the stimulation-pulse shapes influence the physiological effect of magnetic stimulation. However, commercial devices only allow minimum control over the pulse shapes. Only sinusoidal and monophasic pulse shapes with fixed pulse widths are available. Only some research groups work on improved stimulation devices with controllable pulse parameters such as pulse frequency, shape, pulse polarity, pulse intensity, or pulse width. Peripheral magnetic stimulation is a promising technique for several applications like rehabilitation or diagnosis of neuronal pathways. However, most available magnetic stimulation devices are designed for transcranial stimulation and require high-power, expensive hardware. We created a computational model to figure out how peripheral nerves are affected by induced magnetic fields and which pulse shapes and coil geometries have the lowest energy requirements to optimize hardware development. In TMS, we developed a high-speed stimulation device to investigate the changes in corticospinal excitability following quadri-pulse theta burst stimulation with individually (I-wave) adapted and fixed interstimulus intervals. Patterned transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of the most popular methods for non-invasive brain stimulation to induce and investigate synaptic plasticity in humans. It is attracting increasing attention in fundamental neuroscience and in treating neurological diseases such as drug-resistant depression and rehabilitation after stroke. Until now, we have done experiments to investigate I-wave dependent metaplasticity in healthy human volunteers and started a randomized sham-controlled, patient- and evaluator-blind study in young patients with an assured clinical diagnosis of unilateral spastic cerebral palsy (Kinderzentrum München/Schön Klinik Vogtareuth). Nevertheless, we will create an enhanced computational model to optimize the efficiency of the stimulation hardware further.