ϵ-Neural Thompson Sampling of Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson Disease Treatment

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) stands as an effective intervention for alleviating the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Traditional commercial DBS devices are only able to deliver fixed-frequency periodic pulses to the basal ganglia (BG) regions of the brain, i.e., continuous DBS (cDBS). However, they in general suffer from energy inefficiency and side effects, such as speech impairment. Recent research has focused on adaptive DBS (aDBS) to resolve the limitations of cDBS. Specifically, rein-forcement learning (RL) based approaches have been developed to adapt the frequencies of the stimuli in order to achieve both energy efficiency and treatment efficacy. However, RL approaches in general require significant amount of training data and computational resources, making it intractable to integrate RL policies into real-time embedded systems as needed in aDBS. In contrast, contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) in general lead to better sample efficiency compared to RL. In this study, we propose a CMAB solution for aDBS. Specifically, we define the context as the signals capturing irregular neuronal firing activities in the BG regions (i.e., beta-band power spectral density), while each ‘arm’ signifies the (discretized) pulse frequency of the stimulation. Moreover, an ϵ-exploring strategy is introduced on top of the classic Thompson sampling method, leading to an algorithm called ϵ-Neural Thompson sampling (ϵ-NeuralTS), such that the learned CMAB policy can better balance exploration and exploitation of the BG environment. The ϵ-NeuralTS algorithm is evaluated using a computation BG model that captures the neuronal activities in PD patients’ brains. The results show that our method outperforms both existing cDBS methods, as well as the baselines that do not use the ϵ-exploring as introduced by our method (i.e., the vanilla Thompson sampling method).