An Interactive Tool for Customizing Clinical Transacranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Experiments

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a very useful technique for neurophysiological and neuropsychological investigations. In this paper we propose a user-friendly and a fully customizable system that allows experimental control, data recording for all the currently used TMS paradigms (single and paired pulse TMS). This system consists of two parts: 1) a user-interface that allows the medical doctors to customize the settings of their experiments and to include post-processing and statistical tools for analyzing the acquired patients data, and 2) a hardware-interface that communicates with the existing TMS equipment. New algorithms for post-processing and new user settings can be easily added without interfering with the hardware part communication. The proposed system was used for conducting a clinical experiment for estimating patterns of cortical excitability in patients with geriatric depression and subcortical ischemic vascular disease, achieving very interesting results from the medical point of view.