Resistor-Capacitor Circuit Model for Predicting TMS Propagation in the Human Connectome

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

Understanding and predicting signal propagation of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) through the human connectome would be immensely useful across research and clinical contexts. To date, neural mass and field models as well as graph-theoretic measures have been employed (Bortoletto et al., 2015; Gollo et al., 2017; Momi et al., 2021; Seguin et al., 2023), but they face challenges in balancing spatial resolution and computational efficiency, particularly when applied to large-scale brain networks. Here, we developed a novel Resistor-Capacitor (RC) circuit model to predict TMS-induced signal propagation across the human connectome. We compared cortical maps of model-predicted TMS-induced activation patterns to those measured in a previous interleaved TMS-fMRI experiment in which triplets of 10Hz stimulation pulses were targeted to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) (Tik et al., 2023). Our model provides dynamic, time-resolved cortical maps of the stimulation-induced brain activity at high spatial resolution, which accord with fMRI measurements.