On this week's Journal Club session, Nada Yousif will talk about her work in the presentation entitled "Optimising burst based deep brain stimulation in a population model of Parkinson's disease and Tremor".

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a therapy used to treat several neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and essential tremor (ET), based on the implantation of electrodes into specific brain targets. Despite its success, the electrical stimulus has remained as a regular frequency square pulse for decades. Recently, there have been proposals that phase-locking, coordinated reset or irregular stimulation patterns may be more effective at desynchronising the pathological neural activity. Here we consider our population level model of the thalamocortical-basal ganglia network, which generates pathological oscillatory activity in the beta band (textasciitilde20 Hz) associated with PD and the tremor band (textasciitilde4 Hz) associated with ET. We stimulate the model with regular, irregular and phase-dependent bursts of DBS, and use an optimisation technique to find the best stimulation parameters in each case. Our results show that bursts can be as or more effective at suppressing pathological oscillations compared to continuous DBS, allowing exploration of stimulation mechanisms to formulate testable predictions regarding DBS.

Date: 2024/12/13
Time: 14:00
Location: Online