A MATLAB-Based Toolbox to Simulate Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation Using Flexible, Fast, and High Quality Tetrahedral Mesh Generation

Abstract

In numerical computation of neuromodulator such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the quality of the tetrahedral mesh is a significant criterion to achieve accurate results in simulating the electric field distribution. Although there are various algorithms and software products have been proposed to achieve this goal, but most of them have challenges in ease of use or in the quality of the final mesh. Even with the production of tetrahedral mesh, there is still a deficiency in the quality of the tetrahedral mesh that leads to reduced accuracy in the final result. In this paper, a new MATLAB toolbox (SimUTab) is presented that uses several useful algorithms in this field and also employs new methods to generate high-quality meshes for head models. The proposed method reduces the difficulties and makes it easy to use. The user interface implemented in MATLAB makes easily designing electrodes even with unusual shapes and hence provides the basis for examining the effect of electrode shapes on the electric field distribution of the target area. The proposed method is tested and compared with other active pipelines. The results confirm the superiority of the proposed method and show an improvement in the quality of the final mesh.

Keywords

• Transcranial direct current stimulation
• structural magnetic resonance segmentation
• finite elements method (FEM) analysis
• forward electric field calculation