Comets (COMputation of Electric field due to Transcranial current Stimulation) is a MATLAB toolbox for simulating local electric fields generated by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). 3D numerical computation of electric fields generated by tDCS has widened our insights into the underlying mechanisms of stimulating current conduction, accelerated the development of new electrode montages, and enabled more accurate field concentrations to targeted brain areas. However, since there has been no well-established field simulator specifically designed for the analysis of electric fields due to tDCS, only a few research groups could access this technology.

  Since Comets has simple and interactive graphical user interfaces, the users can readily simulate various electrode configurations, electrode sizes, and electrode orientations, without a need to code any MATLAB scripts. Comets evaluates the 3D cortical current distributions based on the electrostatic finite element method (FEM). Although only a standard human head model is provided in the current version, users may import their own head model datasets for specific research purposes. For advanced 3D visualization of resultant cortical current distributions, the output data can also be exported to readily accessible ASCII-format data files.

  The toolbox package is freely available at http://cone.hanyang.ac.kr or http://www.cometstool.com for noncommercial and academic uses. Currently, our toolbox cannot be used for a medical use, but for research and education purposes only.

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To download the latest version of Comets, please click the above logo picture!

Release Note (YY/MM/DD)

(12/04/01) Comets 1.00b was released for the first time.

(12/11/10) Comets 1.03 was released (latest version - many bugs were fixed).

  Documents

An article introducing Comets toolbox has been published in 'Biomedical Engineering Letters', an international journal. Please cite the following paper if you use Comets for your publication.

Young-Jin Jung, Jung-Hoon Kim, and Chang-Hwan Im, "COMETS: A MATLAB Toolbox for Simulating Local Electric Fields Generated by Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS)," Biomedical Engineering Letters, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 39-46, 2013. [pdf download]

User Manual

- Download user manual (2.32 MB) (download)

Supplementary Files

- A document describing how to generate users' own head-cortex models (download)

- Examples of *.sxx files from CURRY6 (download)

- A program to convert CURRY6 sxx files to head-cortex models that can be used in Comets (download)

- (new) A data conversion program for *.sxx files exported from CURRY7 (download)

FAQ

- Frequently Asked Questions (under construction)

- Comets was developed by

    Dr. Young-Jin Jung (currently in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, US) and

    Prof. Chang-Hwan Im (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University, Korea)

The official E-mail address of Comets is cometstool@gmail.com

If you want to receive news of Comets, please send us your E-mail address along with your name and affiliation.

We welcome user feedbacks for improving the toolbox!!