Astrocyte stimulation as a new technique to desynchronize two coupled neurons

Experimental researches in recent years have proven that glial cells and specifically astrocytes play several important roles in the central nervous system. Due to difficulties in investigation of astrocyte's functions in neural information processing mechanisms, an appropriate method is computational modeling approach. In this paper, we use the Li-Rinzel model for astrocyte and Izhikevich model for neurons to create a tripartite synapse model and then the role of astrocyte in neural synchronization is explored. Next, the new mechanism of stimulating astrocyte to support impaired astrocyte to maintain normal neural oscillations is proposed. Simulation results show that the malfunction of astrocyte which in turn induces hyper synchronization of the coupled neurons could be compensated by stimulating the astrocyte using an external stimulator.