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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
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MathAna
Abstract: General anaesthesia is an important method in today's hospital practice and especially in surgery. To supervise the depth of anaesthesia during surgery, the anaesthesist applies electroencephalography (EEG) and monitors the brain activity of the subject on the scalp. The applied monitoring machine calculates the change of the power spectrum of the brain signals to indicate the anaesthetic depth. This procedure is based on the finding that the concentration increase of the anaesthetic drug changes the EEG-power spectrum in a significant way. Although this procedure is applied world-wide, the underlying neural mechanism of the spectrum change is still unknown. The project aims to elucidate the underlying neural mechanism by a detailed investigating a mathematical model of neural populations. The investigation is based on analytical calculations in a neural population model of the cortex involving intrinsic neural properties of brain areas and feedback loops to other areas, such as the loop between the cortex and the thalamus. Currently, there are two proposed mechanisms for the charactertisic change of the power spectrum: a highly nonlinear jump in the activation (so-called phase transition) and a linear behaviour.
The project mainly focusses on the nonlinear jump to finally rule it out or support it. A subsequent comparison to previous experimenta results aims to fit the physiological parameters. Since the cortex population is embedded into a network of other cortical areas and the thalamus, the corresponding analytical investigations takes into account external stochastic (from other brain areas) and time-periodic (thalamic) forces. To this end it is necessary to develop several novel nonlinear analysis technique of neural populations to derive the power spectrum close to the phase transition and conditions for physiological parameters.