Project description
Mental health treatment through neuromodulation
Depression, dementia, addiction or obsessive-compulsive disorder affect more than 1 billion people worldwide. With funding from the European Research Council, the BNCI2 project aims to develop an easy system to identify and modify brain activity signals related to such disorders. The idea is that by finely modulating these signals, we can effectively treat the clinical symptoms that they cause, without side effects.Researchers will exploit quantum sensor technology that can target multiple brain areas at millimetre precision. They will combine it with millisecond-precise magnetic stimulation to create a new tool, which will eventually be validated on individuals diagnosed with brain disorders. The project offers promising prospects for clinical diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions.
Objective
More than 1 billion people worldwide suffer from compromised mental health due to a brain disorder, such as depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or dementia. While already accounting for 19% of all years lived with disability, the relative share of these disorders is further increasing. Currently, due to the complexity of the human mind and brain, effective and side effect-free treatment options are lacking. To establish such options would not only require identifying the underlying neural substrates of clinical symptoms, but also effective means to directly modulate them.
While advanced neuroimaging could link specific clinical symptoms to the metabolic activity of cortical and subcortical networks or neural circuits, it is unclear how this metabolic activity translates to the continuously evolving dynamics of widespread brain oscillatory activity. A possible way to identify and target such oscillatory brain states would be the use of millimeter-precise and brain state-dependent neuromodulation, e.g. using electric or magnetic fields. However, this could not be established yet because reliable and accurate assessment of brain oscillations is impeded by stimulation artifacts. Moreover, there are no stimulation tools available that provide sufficient focality and steerability to target dynamic brain states at multiple locations with millisecond-precision. Building on our previous work, we will overcome these limitations and establish a new approach that combines quantum sensors offering unprecedented accuracy with closed-loop temporal interference magnetic stimulation to target cortical and subcortical areas at millimeter- and millisecond precision. The system will be validated in persons diagnosed with depression, OCD, addiction, and dementia. Finally, the paradigm will be implemented in a portable system to foster fast adoption in clinical environments.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineneurologydementia
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
10117 Berlin
Germany