Using multiple separately controlled contacts for effective deep brain stimulation.

What is it about?

DBS is a treatment for a variety of neurological disorders including Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, depression and pain. An important recent development in DBS technology are electrodes with multiple independently controllable contacts and this paper is a theoretical study into the effects of using this new technology. On the basis of a theoretical model, we devise a closed-loop strategy and address the question of how to best apply DBS across multiple contacts. We demonstrate using numerical simulation that, for the systems we consider, our methods are more effective than two well-known alternatives. We also predict that the benefits of using multiple contacts should depend strongly on the intrinsic neuronal response. The insights from this work should lead to a better understanding of how to implement and optimise closed-loop multi-contact DBS systems which in turn should lead to more effective and efficient DBS treatments.

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Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Why is it important?

An important recent development in DBS technology are electrodes with multiple independently controllable contacts and our work represents a timely theoretical study into the effects of using this new technology. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first-of-its-kind to model the effects of closed-loop DBS for multi-contact systems. We believe this represents an especially important contribution to the field since, due to their increased complexity, these systems have previously been seen as prohibitive in a closed-loop setting. We therefore believe our work would be of considerable interest to those from the computational and experimental neuroscience communities, including those involved in the development of medical devices. The insights obtained from this work should lead to a better understanding of how to implement and optimise closed-loop multi-contact DBS systems which in turn should lead to more effective and efficient DBS treatments.