Seminar: Nichtlineare Dynamik in Lasern

Location: PN 731

Time: Tuesday, 06.02.2007, 16:15

Efficient neuromodulation of excitability to prevent the spread of pathological activity

Dr. Markus Dahlem (TU Berlin) 

Various pathological states in the brain are associated with altered physiological excitability. The spatio-temporal patterns that are often exhibited, e.g., during migraine, seizure, and stroke, constitute examples of excitable behaviour emerging from the pathological pathway. In particular, an initially localized pathological state can start to spread. This indicates a transition from the unexcitable to the subexcitable regime. We investigate this regime of excitability in the generic FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) system. Our goal is to define an efficient neuromodulation minimizing the volume of affected tissue. The question of such a therapeutic optimization is whether structures in control theory can be treated as a structure in differential geometry by regarding parameter plane S of the FHN as a differential manifold endowed with a Riemannian metric. We suggest to equip S in the region of subexcitability with a metric given by pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic models of drug receptor interaction.

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