BME PhD Proposal Presentation

Date: 2023-08-25
Time: 8:00 AM
Location / Meeting Link: Woodruff Memorial Research Building, 6th floor ENTICE Conference room; Zoom link: https://emory.zoom.us/j/7856901843?pwd=TCswd3NXRkRuQ0tiK0Z2QTNYN1BLQT09

Committee Members:
Robert E. Gross, MD/PhD (advisor); Svjetlana Miocinovic, MD/PhD; Matthew C. Gombolay, PhD; Michael J. Kahana, PhD; Chethan Pandarinath, PhD


Title: Optimizing brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease, memory enhancement, and optogenetic control

Abstract:
Brain stimulation has become an effective tool to treat drug-resistant patients with neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and many more emerging conditions. To achieve the greatest benefit, brain stimulation parameters – values such as the amplitude, frequency, and location of electrical current delivered to the brain – must be personalized according to each patient’s electrode placement, neuroanatomy, and physiological expression of their disease. Currently, clinicians must select each patient’s stimulation parameters manually by monitoring their symptoms (e.g. tremor severity, frequency of seizures) in a months-long trial-and-error process, delaying optimal clinical outcomes. Automating this process can lead to earlier improvement in patients’ quality-of-life and better outcomes for many applications of brain stimulation where manual parameter selection is challenging due to limited symptom expression. In this thesis, I first propose a fully automated system for optimizing deep brain stimulation treatment for Parkinson’s disease, a well-established brain stimulation indication. This approach uses meta-active learning, an AI method that learns from a database of prior patients to (in real-time) interact with the brain and quickly find parameters that maximize neurophysiological biomarkers measuring which neural pathways are engaged by stimulation. Second, I examine the neurophysiological effects of cortical stimulation on brain-wide networks in patients with epilepsy, so that this methodology can be extended for patient-specific targeting of a novel brain stimulation paradigm for repairing memory dysfunction in diseases such as epilepsy and traumatic brain injury. Last, I examine how parameter optimization can enable precision modulation of hippocampal activity in rats using optogenetic stimulation (the control of neural activity using light) to improve the use of brain stimulation in translational research settings.