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The Virtual Brain: Bernstein Center Lectures 2019

Level
Beginner

This course provides a general overview about brain simulation, including its fundamentals as well as clinical applications in populations with stroke, neurodegeneration, epilepsy, and brain tumors. This course also introduces the mathematical framework of multi-scale brain modeling and its analysis. In particular, you will get to know the open-source neuroinfromatics platform The Virtual Brain (TVB), and learn how to interact with it either via both the graphical user interface and Python scripts. By the end of the course, you will be able to create your own epilepsy brain simulations. The lectures were originally given in the Bernstein Center of Computational Neuroscience in Berlin in April 2019.

Course Features
Videos
Lectures
Tutorials
Lessons of this Course
1
1
Duration:
1:35:08
Speaker:

The Virtual Brain (TVB) is an open-source, multi-scale, multi-modal brain simulation platform. In this lesson, you get introduced to brain simulation in general and to TVB in particular. This lesson also presents the newest approaches for clinical applications of TVB - that is, for stroke, epilepsy, brain tumors, and Alzheimer’s disease - and show how brain simulation can improve diagnostics, therapy, and understanding of neurological disease.

2
2
Duration:
1:49:24

This lesson explains the mathematics of neural mass models and their integration to a coupled network. You will also learn about bifurcation analysis, an important technique in the understanding of non-linear systems and as a fundamental method in the design of brain simulations. Lastly, the application of the described mathematics is demonstrated in the exploration of brain stimulation regimes.

3
3
Duration:
1:12:24

This lesson introduces the practical usage of The Virtual Brain (TVB) in its graphical user interface and via python scripts. In the graphical user interface, you are guided through its data repository, simulator, phase plane exploration tool, connectivity editor, stimulus generator, and the provided analyses. The implemented iPython notebooks of TVB are presented, and since they are public, can be used for further exploration of TVB. 

4
4
Duration:
1:28:53

In this lesson, the simulation of a virtual epileptic patient is presented as an example of advanced brain simulation as a translational approach to deliver improved clinical results. You will learn about the fundamentals of epilepsy, as well as the concepts underlying epilepsy simulation. By using an iPython notebook, the detailed process of this approach is explained step by step. In the end, you are able to perform simple epilepsy simulations your own.