For millions of people with epilepsy and movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, electrical stimulation of the brain already is widening treat

New AI algorithm to improve brain stimulation devices to treat disease -- ScienceDaily

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2021-09-05 22:00:05

For millions of people with epilepsy and movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, electrical stimulation of the brain already is widening treatment possibilities. In the future, electrical stimulation may help people with psychiatric illness and direct brain injuries, such as stroke.

However, studying how brain networks interact with each other is complicated. Brain networks can be explored by delivering brief pulses of electrical current in one area of a patient's brain while measuring voltage responses in other areas. In principle, one should be able to infer the structure of brain networks from these data. However, with real-world data, the problem is difficult because the recorded signals are complex, and a limited amount of measurements can be made.

To make the problem manageable, Mayo Clinic researchers developed a set of paradigms, or viewpoints, that simplify comparisons between effects of electrical stimulation on the brain. Because a mathematical technique to characterize how assemblies of inputs converge in human brain regions did not exist in the scientific literature, the Mayo team collaborated with an international expert in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to develop a new type of algorithm called "basis profile curve identification."

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