Mental health remains a pertinent issue in today’s society and 1 in 5 adults struggle with a mental health disorder.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a solution that offers a non-invasive, promising treatment for a range of mental health conditions like depression, OCD, and PTSD, especially for patients unresponsive to traditional therapies. However, accurate brain model to practice TMS does not exist, so administration of TMS treatment is done directly on patients, which limits our ability to experiment for advancement and optimization of TMS.

To address this, replicas of the brain, known as ‘brain phantoms’, have been created, and my research task focused on testing a new fiber-based synaptic device that is integrated into the brain phantoms to determine if it can replicate the integrate-and-fire behavior of neurons, thereby improving the anatomical accuracy of the brain phantoms on which TMS simulation can be performed.

To characterize the ability of this fiber to mimic neuronal behavior, TMS stimulations were pulsed at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% strengths (in amps), and the resistive response was measured. After the experiment concluded and the data was analyzed, a pattern emerged in three of the four magnetic field variables, showing excitation and damping in the oscillation of resistivity. However, this pattern was most dominant at 75% of the complete magnetic field. It was summarized that the resistive characteristics of the synaptic device resembled those of neurons when the magnetic stimulation was 75%. Typically, a waveform of the firing signals would show oscillating peaks with a steeper increase and a more shallow decrease. From the data, the pattern represents the gradual decrease of resistivity while still creating peaks at each pulse.

Thus, knowing the range in which this neuron-like fiber displays similar behaviors is crucial for improving the accuracy of brain phantoms and implementing this device in other fields such as neuromorphic computing and neural prosthetics.