Notes from Industry

Detecting Beeps from Brains

Developing methods towards better deep brain stimulation treatments.

Authors: Jordan Taylor and Melvyn Yap (Neuroscience Research Team at Max Kelsen)

Image edited from https://unsplash.com/photos/IHfOpAzzjHM. Thanks to Robina Weermeijer.

We used the activity of a few neurons in the brains of rats to predict the timing of audio beeps they were hearing. Hopefully, the models and insights we developed for this problem may eventually be useful on the path towards improving treatments for Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders.

Background

Deep brain stimulation is being used to help alleviate the symptoms of severe Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, and epilepsy (with recent promising results in treating severe depression). It involves inserting electrodes into specific parts of the brain, as shown in figure 1, and then later tuning their electrical pulses to alleviate symptoms. Once the pulse pattern is set, it is usually left pulsing continuously.

Figure 1: Deep brain stimulation. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Typical_deep_brain_stimulation_setup.jpg

Recently, there has been growing interest in using deep brain stimulation electrodes to measure the activity of the surrounding neurons in the patient’s…