Joint Hamilton Institute / Human Health Institute Seminar

Wednesday, April 3, 2019 - 13:00 to 14:00
Hamilton Institute Seminar Room 317, 3rd Floor Eolas Building, North Campus, Maynooth University

Speaker: ​Professor Madeleine Lowery, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin

Title: "Rhythms of the brain : Computational modelling of deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease"

Abstract: Over the past twenty five years deep brain stimulation (DBS) has become established as an effective therapy for treating the symptoms a number of movement and psychiatric disorders, with particular success in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Despite its widespread application, the mechanisms of DBS are not yet fully understood and there remains a need to improve DBS to improve long-term stimulation across a wider patient population, limit side-effects, and extend stimulator battery life. Currently DBS operates in an ‘open-loop’ manner, with stimulus parameters empirically set and remaining fixed over time.  The development of ‘closed-loop’ DBS systems offer the possibility to continuously adjust stimulation parameters based on patient symptoms and side-effects.  This offers to the potential to increase therapeutic efficacy while reducing side-effects, costs and energy.  This talk will explore how computational modelling can be used to provide insight into the changes that occur within the human nervous system in Parkinson’s disease and how deep brain stimulation alters this behavior at the level of the individual cell and at the system level.  The ability of different closed-loop control systems to control biomarkers derived from local field potentials recorded at the DBS electrode can be explored using the model, providing a path towards pre-clinical testing of new stimulation paradigms.

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