Optimization of Patient Specific Stimulus for Deep Brain Stimulation Using Spatially Distributed Neural Sources

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) becomes the therapy of choice in the later stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) due to the medication's side effects. For effective DBS treatment, it is important to have a controlled dosage of DBS. DBS dosage is administered using the tuning of electrical parameters of the stimulus signal. Since this tuning process is tedious, time-consuming, and patient-specific, there is a need to study the properties of DBS stimulation signal for proper dose administration. We propose a simulation framework to define an optimized DBS stimulus using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. The objective is to provide a simulation environment inspired by a realistic brain. The framework uses spiking neurons in a reservoir modeled after real brain anatomy and is trained using a biologically inspired spike-time-dependent-plasticity learning algorithm. This reservoir is initially set to OFF-medication state and forced to drift to the ON-medication state by optimizing the synaptic changes. In later testing, the generalization of this framework is verified with EEG-inverse solutions, such as standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography, which utilize time-domain EEG signals to estimate neural activations. The stimulus signal is generated by accumulating the variations in synaptic weights in the neural reservoir in the target brain region. We analyze this signal and show that the application of this signal as stimulus results in decreased
$\beta$
-band power in subthalamic-nucleus local field potential compared to OFF-medication local field potential without stimulation. Using SIM4LIFE simulation software, we show that the simulation increases chaos in the local field potential of subthalamic-nucleus neurons and shows that neuron weight variations follow specific trajectories in reconstructed state space.