| Speaker: Rafal Bogacz Affiliation: University of Oxford Time: 2 pm Thursday, 12 March, 2020 Location: 303-257 |
| Many symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are connected with abnormally high levels of synchrony in neural activity. A successful and established treatment for a drug-resistant form of the disease involves electrical stimulation of brain areas affected by the disease, which has been shown to desynchronize neural activity. Recently, a closed-loop deep brain stimulation has been developed, in which the provided stimulation depends on the amplitude or phase of oscillations that are monitored in patient’s brain. The aim of this work was to develop a mathematical model that can capture experimentally observed effects of closed-loop deep brain stimulation, and suggest how the stimulation should be delivered on the basis of the ongoing activity to best desynchronize the neurons. We studied a simple model, in which individual neurons were described as coupled oscillators. We first analysed the effects of stimulations through a single electrode in the model, and compared them with experimental data. Then we analysed a more general case of stimulations with electrodes including multiple contacts that can be independently controlled. Our work suggests efficient control strategies for such multi-contact closed loop deep brain stimulation. |