Project Details
Projekt
Connectome based modelling to reveal multi-scale mechanisms in stroke
Subject Area
Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
Term
from 2017 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 347469655
Stroke is a devastating medical condition with high socioeconomic burden. Current treatment and rehabilitation strategies have improved but do not account sufficiently for individual disease patterns. This may partly explain that current treatment results are not satisfactory. Advanced neuroimaging provides the necessary new technology to create personalized disease assessment. It can provide grounds for improved treatment and personalized rehabilitation. We aim at applying and refining an open-source analysis and brain network-modelling framework that creates whole-brain simulations from multimodal brain imaging data for individualized clinical use in stroke patients. The technological resource, called The Virtual Brain (TVB), has been developed on a community standard platform, allowing usability and flexibility for implementation across multiple sites. In the current project, TVB will be applied in an interdisciplinary transregional effort to an existing large longitudinal cohort of stroke patients. We will adjust the biophysical brain model to optimally represent altered brain connectivity and function in the process of re-learning and developing lost motor skills during recovery from an acquired focal damage to the brain. The use of TVB in the setting of stroke shall ultimately result in a clinically relevant application enabling to simulate individual patient brains before and after interventions. This will allow for selection of individually tailored therapies and will better predict trajectories of recovery. We will achieve this goal by identifying most generic brain models and mechanisms below the spatial and temporal resolution of non-invasive imaging, i.e., micro-scale processes which can be inferred from the TVB model. Objectives. We aim at providing proof of concept that TVB is useful to identify micro-scale (i.e., cellular) processes in stroke that are predictive of therapy success on an individual level. Our specific goals are to 1) virtualize the brains of individual patients with stroke at the acute and chronic stages of the disease and reveal altered biophysical parameters; 2) identify candidate biomarkers of the recovery potential based on biophysical parameters; 3) validate the neurophysiological interpretation of the inferred markers through targeted probing of hub and edge properties, like directed inhibition or facilitation, by double-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation; 4) create an interactive data sharing tool with standardized processing pipelines allowing to pool data across centres and increase the power of clinical stroke studies that apply TVB. Impact. The novelty of the project is to understand stroke as a brain disorder from the perspective of disruption of information processing architectures that goes beyond the conventional morphological or neurophysiological approaches, i.e., towards micro-scale processes inferred from modelling.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Subproject of
SPP 2041:
Computational Connectomics
