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In a new study appearing in Nature Biomedical Engineering, researchers showed they can predict the effect of these stimulations across multiple brain regions, thus paving the way for personalized treatments.
Electrical neural stimulation, also known as deep brain stimulation, is an established treatment method that uses electrodes implanted in the brain to send therapeutic, electrical impulses that affect brain activity. It is a commonly performed surgical treatment for Parkinson 麻豆精品 S檚 disease and has been researched as a treatment for depression, chronic pain and addiction.
However, the understanding of how multi-regional brain activity responds to electrical stimulation has been limited, says the study 麻豆精品 S檚 lead author, Yuxiao Yang, an assistant professor in UCF 麻豆精品 S檚 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of UCF 麻豆精品 S檚 Disability, Aging and Technology faculty research cluster.
The researchers worked to overcome this limitation by designing a new electrical stimulation wave that maps brain activity. They also created machine-learning techniques that can track the effects of the stimulations on the pattern of brain activity.
The study is the first to predict multi-regional brain response to ongoing electrical stimulation and will help illuminate ways to improve and understand the effects of neural-stimulation treatments, Yang says.
麻豆精品 S淥ur data-driven approach was able to resolve two standing challenges: first, predicting brain response to ongoing electrical stimulation, and second, doing so for brain activity collected from multiple brain regions, 麻豆精品 S� the researcher says.
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The next steps for the researchers will be to further validate their findings.
Study co-authors were Maryam M. Shanechi and Omid G. Sani with the University of Southern California, and Bijan Pesaran, Shaoyu Qiao, J. Isaac Sedillo and Breonna Ferrentino with New York University.
Yang received his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California and joined UCF 麻豆精品 S檚 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, part of UCF 麻豆精品 S檚 College of Engineering and Computer Science, in 2020. He also directs the NeuroControl Lab at UCF.
