Authors:
Ionuţ Trestian
1
;
Octavian Creţ
1
;
Laura Creţ
1
;
Lucia Văcariu
1
;
Radu Tudoran
1
and
Florent de Dinechin
2
Affiliations:
1
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
;
2
LIP, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, UMR CNRS / INRIA / ENS-Lyon / Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France
Keyword(s):
Magnetic stimulation, slinky coils, inductance computation, FPGA, floating point, VHDL
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Bio-Electromagnetism
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Equipment
;
Biomedical Instrumentation
;
Biomedical Instruments and Devices
;
Technologies Evaluation
Abstract:
In the last years the interest for magnetic stimulation of the human nervous tissue has increased considerably, because this technique has proved its utility and applicability both as a diagnostic and as a treatment instrument. Research in this domain is aimed at removing some of the disadvantages of the technique: the lack of focalization of the stimulated region and the reduced efficiency of the energetic transfer from the stimulating coil to the tissue. Better stimulation coils can solve these problems. Designing coils is so far a trial-and error process, relying on very compute-intensive simulations. In software, such a simulation has a very high running time. This paper proposes and demonstrates an FPGA-based hardware implementation of this simulation, which reduces the computation time by 4 orders of magnitude. Thanks to this powerful tool, some significant improvements in the design of the coils have already been obtained.