Debugging the Brain: Reading and Writing Human Cortex using Electroencephalography (EEG) and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

The Temerty Centre for Therapeutic Brain Intervention aims to find new understandings of and approaches for hard-totreat mental illnesses across patients’ lifespans by delivering high quality clinical care and research using brain stimulation and psychedelic therapies. Personalized modulation of brain networks with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a promising treatment for neuropsychiatric brain disorders such a major depressive disorder. However, there is a need to
better optimize the treatment, to increase patient’s quality of life and reduce healthcare costs (Fitzgibbon et al., 2020). To do so requires the ability to reliably decode the brain activity evoked by TMS, as measured by Electroencephalography (EEG). However, it is challenging to analyze this EEG data because it has high dimensionality (an EEG recording from one patient contains thousands of data points for each of the 64 electrodes in an EEG cap) and noise (patient movements such as eye blinking can introduce artifacts in the signal (Louis et al., 2016)). EEG data analysis for TMS sessions is further complicated because, to extract relevant insights from a single trial data of EEG data, prior information on the expected signal features is required, yet currently not known (Hernandez-Pavon et al., 2023).

Faculty Supervisor:

Arvind Gupta;Huaxiong Huang

Student:

Partner:

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Toronto

Program: