A computational model for simulating normoxic and ischemic cortical spreading depression is available from the Neural Modeling research group, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland at College Park. The version available was developed in November of 1997.
Selected output of external potassium (K) from an ischemic simulation, using baseline parameter settings as found in the distributed CSD software, is available for on-line viewing. The output was generated by the data visualization package cref, also included with the distributed CSD software. Cref produces a colored rectangular grid surface, where the color is proportional to the K level of each cortical element in the grid at a particular timestep in the simulation. The colormap used here is defined over fifty shades of gray, ranging from black for K levels of 0.0 to white for K levels of 1.0; the background outside of the simulation grid is colored blue.
Click on the image below to see an animation of selected cref output frames of
external potassium (K)
over the course of a 260000 timestep simulation.
The software which implements this computational model of cortical spreading depression in normoxic and ischemic environments is available for downloading. The software was developed under Unix but can be ported to the other platforms since all source code is included.
Download the
software, and uncompress by typing
from the directory where you have downloaded the software (you will be
prompted for the directory name prior to downloading; all files will be
unpackaged into a CSD directory). The files
are stored in a PKZIP (MSDOS) compatible format. The Readme
file included with the packaged files provides information on compiling
and using the included systems.