O. CREŢ,
I. TRESTIAN, F. DE DINECHIN, L. DARABANT, R. TUDORAN, L. VĂCARIU
Accelerating The Computation of The Physical Parameters Involved in
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Using FPGA Devices
Abstract. In the last years the interest for magnetic stimulation of the
human nervous tissue has increased, because this technique has proved its
utility and applicability both as a diagnostic and as a treatment instrument.
Research in this domain is aimed at eliminating some disadvantages of the
technique: the lack of focalization of the stimulated human body region and the
reduced efficiency of the energetic transfer from the stimulating coil to the
tissue. Designing better stimulation coils is so far a trial-and-error process,
relying on very compute-intensive simulations. In software, such a simulation
has a very high running time (several hours for complicated geometries of the
coils). This paper proposes and demonstrates an FPGA-based hardware
implementation of this simulation, which reduces the computation time by 2-3
orders of magnitude. Thanks to this powerful tool, some significant improvements
in the design of the coils have already been obtained.
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