Optimal Transcranial Electrical Stimulation for Tumor Treating Fields

I worked on this project during 2023 while conducting research for my undergraduate thesis. I studied the transcranial electrical stimulation inverse problem and developed optimization methods to improve a brain tumor treating technique based on electric fields applied to glioblastomas.

Transcranial electrical stimulation studies the effects of applying low-intensity electrical currents to the human brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. Tumor Treating Fields are one application of this idea, consisting of alternating electric fields applied to a tumoral region.

The conventional stimulation protocol switches between two ad-hoc anterior-posterior and left-right stimulation patterns. These patterns do not explicitly account for the tumor location or for the geometrical and electrical properties of the tissues that affect the electric field distribution.

In this project, I generated realistic human head models in MATLAB, solved Maxwell-type field equations numerically using the Finite Element Method, developed spatial optimization methods to enhance Tumor Treating Fields, and built a statistical model to estimate the probability of cancer cell death.