Optimal Transcranial Electrical Stimulation for Tumor Treating

I conducted this project with a CICPBA trainee fellowship, in LEICI Institute at Universidad Nacional de La Plata during 2023 year, as undergraduate thesis for telecommunications engineering.

Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) is a field that investigates the effects of applying low-intensity electrical currents to the human brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) is one application of tES, that consists of applying alternating electric fields (∼300KHz) to a tumoral region to arrest its growth. The physiological principle is that cancer cells are killed during mitosis if the fields are aligned with the cell subdivision direction. The conventional protocol involves switching between two ad-hoc and intuitive anterior-posterior and left-right stimulation patterns. The problem is that these patterns do not consider the tumor location, nor the geometrical and electrical properties of the different tissues of the brain that affect the electric field. There are techniques to mitigate or reduce these problems and get the best possible electric field within the tumor. This is known as optimization. However, this technique has not been studied or applied to TTFields.

In this project, I have generated realistic human head models in MATLAB, solved Maxwell’s equations using the Finite Element Method, developed and applied spatial optimization to enhance TTFields, and lastly, I developed an statistical model to estimate the probability of kill the cancer cell, to quantify the enhancement of the method.

More details with mathematics are going to be written here in the future.