Modeling Motor Responses of Paraplegics under Epidural Spinal Cord Stimulation: Computational Modeling Technical Report

This technical report describes the computational model in our paper, Modeling Motor Responses of Paraplegic Patients under Epidural Spinal Cord Stimulation, appearing at the 2017 IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering. This model is the basis of our human spinal cord simulations. The study utilizes the finite element method [1] to simulate the electrical activity within the spinal cord and nearby tissues; this technique numerically solves a system of partial differential equations over a specified geometry. Simulations were performed via COMSOL MultiphysicsR , version 5.1. The following sections detail our modeling procedure, including the spinal cord geometry, equations solved over this domain, material properties, and finite element analysis.