Designing a deep brain stimulator to suppress pathological neuronal synchrony

Neural Netw. 2015 Mar:63:282-92. doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2014.12.008. Epub 2014 Dec 29.

Abstract

Some of neuropathologies are believed to be related to abnormal synchronization of neurons. In the line of therapy, designing effective deep brain stimulators to suppress the pathological synchrony among neuronal ensembles is a challenge of high clinical relevance. The stimulation should be able to disrupt the synchrony in the presence of latencies due to imperfect knowledge about parameters of a neuronal ensemble and stimulation impacts on the ensemble. We propose an adaptive desynchronizing deep brain stimulator capable of dealing with these uncertainties. We analyze the collective behavior of the stimulated neuronal ensemble and show that, using the designed stimulator, the resulting asynchronous state is stable. Simulation results reveal the efficiency of the proposed technique.

Keywords: Adaptive structure; Desynchronizing stimulation; Hindmarsh–Rose neural networks.

MeSH terms

  • Brain / physiology*
  • Brain Waves
  • Deep Brain Stimulation / instrumentation
  • Deep Brain Stimulation / methods*
  • Humans
  • Models, Neurological*