Navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation: brief review of engineering solutions

Abstract

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) stands out among the rapidly developing methods for clinical rehabilitation of patients after cerebral vascular accidents. The method is widely used not only in post-stroke rehabilitation, but also in sports medicine, psychiatry and other fields of medicine. However, there is an unresolved issue related to precise targeting and holding the magnetic field focus on the points of interest in the brain when performing TMS. Unprecise magnetic field focus localization may result in the emergence of side effects during the TMS session. The review provides the existing solutions of these problems, comparison of the commercially available navigation devices for TMS, analysis of their composition and operation algorithms; promising directions of developing hardware for TMS navigation are proposed.