A Numerical Study on Microgap-Based Focal Brain Cooling Device to Mitigate Hotspot for the Treatment of Epileptic Seizure

Abstract

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by abnormally excessive and synchronized brain cell activities causing seizures. For proper functioning of the brain, epilepsy should be diagnosed with existing treatments such as medication therapy, lorazepam, benzodiazepine drug intake, and surgery. However, 30–40% of people continue to have a seizure because of the available treatments. So, the focal brain cooling device (FBC) is a new alternative cooling method in which affected brain tissue is cooled to suppress unprovoked seizures. The present numerical study investigates the cooling effectiveness by adding three different structured titanium micro pin fins in the existing base model. A finite volume-based software fluent-15.0 is used to perform transient heat transfer analysis and flow hydrodynamics. The numerical results obtained show that the temperature distribution is found and more uniform and diamond-structured micro pin fin takes less than 7 min to reach below 15 °C, which is desirable to diminish the high-frequency and high-amplitude epileptic discharges.