Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP)

Date: Thursday, September 14th, 2023
Time: 12pm - 1:00pm
Location: NLSN 1215

Title: Spatially-specific, closed-loop, infrared thalamocortical deep brain stimulation

Speaker: Edward Bartlett, PHD, Professor - BIO/BME

Abstract: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a powerful clinical tool for the treatment of circuit-based neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Electrical DBS is, however, limited by the spread of stimulus currents into tissue unrelated to treatment, potentially causing abhorrent patient side effects. In this work, we utilize infrared neural stimulation (INS), an optical neuromodulation technique which uses near to mid infrared light, to drive graded excitatory and inhibitory responses in nerves and neurons, to facilitate an optical and spatially constrained DBS paradigm. INS has been shown to provide spatially constrained responses in the cochlea and in cortical neurons. Unlike other optical techniques, INS does not require genetic modification of neural targets. In this study, we show that INS produces graded, biophysically relevant single-unit responses with robust information transfer in thalamocortical circuits. Importantly, we show that cortical spread of activation from thalamic INS produces more spatially constrained response profiles than conventional electrical stimulation. Owing to observed spatial precision, we used deep reinforcement learning to close the loop on thalamocortical INS, creating real time representations of stimulus-response dynamics while driving cortical neurons to precise firing patterns. Our data suggest that INS can serve as a spatially precise and for both open and closed-loop DBS. .

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