Student: Queen E. Nyemekye
Project Mentors: Dr Jit Muthuswamy- SBHSE
Dr Eric Maass – Medtronic
Dr Arati Sridharan- SBHSE
YouTube Link: View the video link below before joining the zoom meeting
Zoom Link: https://asu.zoom.us/j/91430293762
Zoom meeting time: 9am - 11am
Abstract
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is one of the most widely used clinical treatments for Parkinson’s disease with 160,000 patients worldwide. Neuronal function in the circuits that are implicated in the Parkinson’s disease is not well understood under normal and different degrees and dysfunction. Further, it is not well understood how electrical stimulation of the sub-thalamic nucleus impacts the functionality of these neuronal circuits. The goal of this project is to quantify the function of neuronal circuits implicated in Parkinson’s disease under normal and diseased states. Using a computational model of neuronal circuits involving the basal ganglia thalamus and cortex, we simulate and model the functions of 10 neurons in each of the 7 regions – cortex, thalamus, sub-thalamic nucleus, globus pallidus (internal), globus pallidus (external), striatum (direct) and striatum (indirect). We build inter-stimulus interval (ISI) histograms of firing rates using bin widths of approximately 5 msec. Models of poisson and normal distributions were used to fit the ISI histograms. The results include statistical models of firing rates in a normal brain, a PD brain and a deep brain stimulated PD brain. These results will now aid in the design of an optimal stimulation waveform using a Bayesian algorithm and smooth interfacing of the neural model and the Bayesian engine.