title: Differential Modulation of Excitatory and Inhibitory Neurons during Periodic Stimulation.
abstract: Non-invasive transcranial neuronal stimulation, in addition to deep brain stimulation, is seen as a promising therapeutic and diagnostic approach for an increasing number of neurological diseases such as epilepsy, cluster headaches, depression, specific type of blindness, and other central nervous system disfunctions. Improving its effectiveness and widening its range of use may strongly rely on development of proper stimulation protocols that are tailored to specific brain circuits and that are based on a deep knowledge of different neuron types response to stimulation. To this aim, we have performed a simulation study on the behavior of excitatory and inhibitory neurons subject to sinusoidal stimulation. Due to the intrinsic difference in membrane conductance properties of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, we show that their firing is differentially modulated by the wave parameters. We analyzed the behavior of the two neuronal types for a broad range of stimulus frequency and amplitude and demonstrated that, within a small-world network prototype, parameters tuning allow for a selective enhancement or suppression of the excitation/inhibition ratio.
authors.affiliation: NeuroChip Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of PadovaPadova, Italy; Institute of Information Technology, Jahangirnagar UniversitySavar, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
authors.forename: Mufti
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mahmud
authors.affiliation: NeuroChip Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Padova Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Vassanelli
keywords: Hodgkin-Huxley model; brain stimulation; excitatory and inhibitory neuron; extracellular stimulation; neurodegenerative diseases; neuronal network; periodic stimulation; transcranial stimulation