Final Report Summary - MATHANA (Mathematical modeling of anaesthetic action) General anaesthesia is an omnipresent medical procedure in hospital practice today. It exhibits several different medical aspects, such as amnesia, analgesia, immobility and loss of consciousness.The aim of the project was to gain deeper insight onto the dynamic neural origin of anaesthetic action and get an answer to the question why and how we lose consciousness during general anaesthesia. We have developed an open-source software tool (NeuralFieldSimulator) that allows to integrate a complex neural population model and visualize it in 2 dimensions. It provides a valuable tool to simulate spatio-temporal neural population activity and hence electroencephalographic data (EEG) typically measured in hospital. In addition, we were able to work out a neural model that allows to reproduce experimental resting EEG data under anaesthesia with the anaesthetic propofol. This work has revealed that different effects on the spectral power in different EEG frequency bands originate from a strong anaesthetic action in the thalamus, a sub-cortical structure in the brain. Since these power effects are strong markers of the state of consciousness in patients under anaesthesia, we were able to link behavioral features to neural origins.
