Benoit Duchet, Gihan Weerasinghe, Hayriye Cagnan, Peter Brown, Christian Bick, Rafal Bogacz
Essential tremor manifests predominantly as a tremor of the upper limbs. One therapy option is high-frequency deep brain stimulation, which continuously delivers electrical stimulation to the ventral intermediate nucleus of the thalamus at about 130 Hz. Constant stimulation can lead to side effects, it is therefore desirable to find ways to stimulate less while maintaining clinical efficacy. One strategy, phase-locked deep brain stimulation, consists of stimulating according to the phase of the tremor. To advance methods to optimise deep brain stimulation while providing insights into tremor circuits, we ask the question: can the effects of phase-locked stimulation be accounted for by a canonical Wilson-Cowan model? We first analyse patient data, and identify in half of the datasets significant dependence of the effects of stimulation on the phase at which stimulation is provided...
March 30, 2020: Journal of Mathematical Neuroscience