Optimizing electrode placement using a multiscale model of the hippocampus

The hippocampus is associated with consolidating short-term memory into long-term memory. Therefore, damage to the hippocampus can result in neurological conditions such as Alzheimer´s, dementia, and other diseases that affect memory. One way of helping patients affected by these conditions is to create a neural prosthesis that replicates the function of the damaged section of the hippocampus. This prosthetic device is built by a) creating an input-output model of the transformation between the still-intact portions of the hippocampus, and b) “instantiating” that model into custom VLSI hardware that´s attached to upstream recording electrodes and downstream stimulating electrodes. However, a phenomenon that´s still not well understood is the neural response to the electrical stimulation: thus, a multi-scale computational model has been developed to study the response to biphasic stimulation in a rat hippocampus.