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The Activating Function Based Volume of Tissue Activated (VTA)

By Gordon Duffley^1,2, Daria Nesterovich Anderson^1,2, Johannes Vorwerk, PhD², Alan "Chuck" Dorval, PhD¹, Christopher R. Butson, PhD^1-4

¹Department of Biomedical Engineering, ²Scientific Computing & Imaging (SCI) Institute, ³Departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery, ⁴Department of Psychiatry, University of Utah

Computational models of the volume of tissue activated (VTA) are commonly used both clinically and for research. Because of the computational demands of the traditional axon model approach, alternative approaches to approximate the VTA have been developed. The goal of this study is to evaluate multiple approaches of calculating approximations of the VTA for monopolar and bipolar stimulations on cylindrical and directional lead designs.

Activating function and electric field norm threshold values were dependent on stimulation amplitude, electrode configuration, and pulse width. All methods resulted in highly similar approximations of the VTA for monopolar stimulation for both the directional the cylindrical DBS lead designs. For bipolar stimulation, the axon model method and AF_{(Max, Tang)} produced similar approximations of the VTA. For bipolar stimulation, AF_{(GP, Max)} produced an approximation of the VTA that was larger than any of the other methods. AF_{(GP, Max)} is not biased by only using tangentially oriented axons, unlike the axon model method and AF_{(Max, Tang)}.

Read the paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

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