The Virtual Brain Node #6 Workshop

This lecture briefly introduces The Virtual Brain (TVB), a multi-scale, multi-modal neuroinformatics platform for full brain network simulations using biologically realistic connectivity, as well as its potential neuroscience applications (e.g., epilepsy cases).

This lecture introduces the theoretical background and foundations that led to the development of TVB, its architecture, and features of its major software components.

Brain network reconstruction from empirical data is of key importance to generate personalized virtual brain models. This lecture will introduce the basic concepts of preprocessing structural, functional and diffusion weighted neuroimages. It highlights the latest methods and pipelines to extract structural as well as functional connectomes according to a multimodal parcellation.

This lecture presents the Graphical (GUI) and Command Line (CLI) User Interface of TVB. Alongside with the speakers, explore and interact with all means necessary to generate, manipulate and visualize connectivity and network dynamics.

This hands-on tutorial focuses on a brief introduction to the GUI of TVB. You will visualize a structural connectome and use it for simulation. The local neural mass model will be explored through the phase plane viewer and a parameter space exploration will be performed to observe different dynamics of the large-scale brain model.

This lecture focuses on higher-level simulation scenarios using stimulation protocols. We demonstrate how to build stimulation patterns in TVB, and use them in a simulation to induced activity dissipating into experimentally known resting-state networks in human and mouse brain, a well as to obtain EEG recordings reproducing empirical findings of other researchers.

Simulate your own stimulation with the TVB graphical user interface. This hands-on shows you how to configure a stimulus for a specific brain region and apply it to the simulation. Afterwards the results are visualized with the TVB 3D viewer.

This lecture presents two recent clinical case studies using TVB: stroke recovery and dementia (due to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)). Using a multi-scale neurophysiological model based on empirical multi-modal neuroimaging data, we show how local and global biophysical parameters characterize changes in individualized patient-specific brain dynamics, predict recovery of motor function for stroke patients, and correlate with individual differences in cognition for AD patients.

Manipulate the default connectome provided with TVB to see how structural lesions effect brain dynamics. In this hands-on session you will insert lesions into the connectome within the TVB graphical user interface (GUI). Afterwards, the modified connectome will be used for simulations and the resulting activity will be analysed using functional connectivity.

Along the example of a patient with bi-temporal epilepsy, we show step by step how to develop a Virtual Epileptic Patient (VEP) brain model and integrate patient-specific information such as brain connectivity, epileptogenic zone and MRI lesions. The patient's brain network model is then evaluated via simulation, data fitting and mathematical analysis. This lecture demonstrates how to develop novel personalized strategies towards therapy and intervention using TVB.

Explore how to setup an epileptic seizure simulation with the TVB graphical user interface. This lesson will show you how to program the epileptor model in the brain network to simulate a epileptic seizure originating in the hippocampus. It will also show how to upload and view mouse connectivity data, as well as give a short introduction to the python script interface of TVB.