Data-Driven Modeling of Normal and Pathological Oscillations in the Hippocampus

Epilepsy is a disorder caused by abnormalities at all levels of neural organization that often have complex and poorly understood interactions. Physiologically detailed computational models provide valuable tools for evaluation of possible clinical treatments of neural disorders because every parameter can be changed and many experimentally inaccessible variables can be observed. We present our recently developed full-scale model of the CA1 subfield in the rodent hippocampus and highlight its role in the study of biophysical neural oscillations, which are important biomarkers of cognitive processes as well as abnormal neural dynamics in epilepsy. This model provides an integrative framework that unifies experimentally derived knowledge about the hippocampus on multiple scales and can yield insight into the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the dynamical regimes of the brain. Such a framework can be useful in studying cellular mechanisms of multitarget pharmacological treatments of neural disorders.