Научный семинар

Alexander Medvedev is Professor of Control Engineering,  Director of Program in Automatic Control, Professor in Charge for PhD program in Automatic Control. Uppsala University, Sweden.

"Individualized Deep Brain Stimulation from a control-engineering perspective"

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an established therapy for treating e.g. Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, as well as epilepsy. In DBS, chronic pulsatile electrical stimulation is administered to a certain target area of the brain through a surgically implanted lead. The stimuli parameters have to be properly tuned in order to achieve therapeutical effect that in most cases is alleviation of the motor symptoms. Tuning of DBS  is currently a tedious task since it is performed manually by medical personnel in a trial-and-error manner. It can be dramatically improved and expedited by means of recently developed mathematical models together with control and estimation technology. This talk presents a control engineering perspective on DBS, viewing it as a control system for minimizing the severity of the symptoms through coordinated manipulation of the stimuli parameters. The DBS model structure comprises a stimulation model, an activation model, and a symptoms model. Each of those is individualized from patient data obtained through medical imaging, electrical measurements, and objective symptom quantification. The proposed approach is illustrated by simulation and clinical data from an individualized DBS model being developed at Uppsala University co-operation with the Uppsala University Hospital.