Abhinav Kamisetty

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has proven to be an effective treatment for essential tremors in Parkinson’s disease, which are observed to be a result of synchronized neuron population activity in the thalamus and basal ganglia. There have been many efforts recently to develop DBS strategies that balance effectiveness (optimal desynchronization or control of neuron activity with minimal side effects) and efficiency (reduce power and computational requirements of DBS implant devices). A recent model released by Tian et. al. (2024) in the paper Model-based closed-loop control of thalamic deep brain stimulation developed a model of a spiking neuron population with plasticity (dynamic neuron connectivity observed in neuron networks) and proposed a closed loop strategy for DBS implementation. However, while this and many other models of synchronized neural circuits and DBS show promise for achieving optimal treatment of tremors, they do not incorporate a key feature of neurons that should be considered: neuron degeneration due to excitotoxicity. It has been observed that neuron cells can die if subject to excessive amounts of activity, which raises concerns on the impact of DBS long term. Thus, we incorporate slow neuron degeneration into the framework of Tian et. al. via the addition of a neuron stress variable and explore the impact of DBS and neuron degeneration on the overall neural circuit over time.