A virtual brain to treat epilepsy, recognized by the EU

The Virtual Brain is an open-source platform for building and simulating customized brain network models. It is offered by the European digital research infrastructure EBRAINS (European Brain Research Infrastructures), of which Aix Marseille Université has been an associate member since January 1ᵉʳ, 2022. EBRAINS is a digital ecosystem where researchers, clinicians and experts converge to explore the complexity of the brain at different scales and derive new solutions for brain medicine and technology.

A virtual brain to simulate brain diseases

The Virtual Brain has been shown to resemble empirically measured functional data in healthy brains, but it has also been applied to several brain diseases, such as stroke, Alzheimer's disease, brain tumors, Parkinson's disease or traumatic brain injury. As the central mechanism of epilepsy lies in the large-scale electrophysiological dysfunction of neurons in their brain network, it is a disease that needs to be modeled by brain network-based simulation. Previous work has reproduced seizure behavior in virtual brains. At the Institute for Systems Neuroscience (amU/Inserm), the laboratory of The Virtual Brain co-founder Viktor Jirsa, a registered clinical trial has been carried out to examine whether personalized predictions of the epileptogenic zone improve the outcome of neurosurgical interventions. 

This tool can therefore be used to predict and locate the areas of a patient's brain where epileptic seizures occur. In addition, brain stimulation in epilepsy enables clinicians to test different surgical scenarios before performing irreversible interventions in the patient's brain. 

Because it can be applied to several brain diseases, this project is in line with Objective 3 of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals: To ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
 

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The Innovation Radar is an initiative of the European Commission to identify innovations and high-potential innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. The aim is to enable every citizen, civil servant, professional and businessman to discover the results of EU innovation funding, and to give them a chance to seek out innovators who could follow in the footsteps of companies such as Skype, TomTom, ARM Holdings, all of which benefited from EU funding in their early days.

This platform is a first step towards realizing these ambitions. It makes information on EU-funded innovations from high-quality projects visible and accessible to the public.

By facilitating access to this information, the European Commission is encouraging the development of a dynamic ecosystem of incubators, entrepreneurs, funding agencies and investors who can help bring EU-funded innovations to market more quickly.