Dose standardization for transcranial electrical stimulation: an accessible approach

• An accessible approach to standardizing dosing for transcranial electrical stimulation (tDCS, tACS, tRNS) supports reproducible neuromodulation and trial design.¹
• Dose standardization is methods-focused and implementation-ready for tES research and regulation.^{1 1}

Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)

• The underlying study was published in Scientific Reports (2025; DOI 10.1038/s41598-025-25649-2) and develops robust multiple linear regression (MLR) models that predict the peak (95th-percentile) E-field strength without requiring participant-specific MRI scans or finite-element E-field modeling.^{2 3}
• Predictors are all readily accessible: age, gender, head circumference, cephalic index, body mass index (BMI), and, for montage-agnostic models, inter-electrode distance.^{2 4}
• Models were trained and validated across 10 electrode montages and 418 healthy adults, comprising N = 4,161 total E-field simulations, and were tested against unseen (held-out) participants.^{2 3}
• Montage-specific models explained on average 43% of peak E-field variability in conventional montages and 21% in high-definition (HD) montages; montage-agnostic models explained 36% and 13%, respectively.^{2 3}
• Compared with fixed-current dosing, the approach reduced the standard deviation of peak E-field strength by about 25.8% for conventional montages and 13.6% for HD montages, though results were inconsistent for HD configurations.²
• Correlational analyses confirmed that age, head circumference, cephalic index, and BMI are inversely correlated with simulated peak E-field strength.⁵
• The authors released MATLAB functions (conv_predict_ef and hd_predict_ef) supporting conventional montages such as F4Cz, C3FP2, F3F4, FPzOz, C3C4, P3FP2 and HD 4x1 rings, with an explicit disclaimer that outputs are population approximations and users remain responsible for safe parameters.⁴
• BCI/clinical implication: an MRI-free, scalable route to individualized current dosing could reduce inter-individual dose variability and improve reproducibility of tES trials and neuromodulation protocols, though experimental validation of downstream efficacy is still needed.^{2 5}

Footnotes

1. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiX0FVX3lxTE1iRm5xUldVSVB4MzJMMUcwM1dVaGtaN2MySkRHUVI1a3p1QTllWEV0MnZyUzhDZ2phVkZ0T0RrMHdyNnVSTkV4MEpGLWw3ZzhNV01CYWh3dW9PRXBxdFpv?oc=5 ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-25649-2 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-25649-2 ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. https://github.com/TothJake/tes-dose ↩ ↩²

5. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/36400/ ↩ ↩²