Adaptive stimulation in biophysical network models
In the past two decades, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has become a widely used therapeutic option for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. As experimental investigations of DBS mechanisms or the development of new protocols are prohibited on humans or are too costly to be performed on non-human primates, computational models are necessary to advance to clinical applications in humans. Students will learn how we design neural network models to simulate not only the parkinsonian state but also how to evaluate the efficacy of different DBS protocols. In particular, students will be exposed to adaptive stimulation protocols and will carry out simulations and analyses to identify possible therapeutic windows of treatments. These simulations will also study the effectiveness of adaptive protocols compared to the conventional treatment, which applies a stream of high-frequency pulses.