The Virtual Congress on

Brain Health

Innovation & Technologies

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) for human patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a success story. By now more than 200,000 PD patients have received STN DBS in ~1000 centers around the world. Nevertheless, only ~25% of PD patients eligible for DBS will have the procedure, and DBS is seldom applied for other brain disorders.

In my talk, I will try to depict the barriers for DBS and to outline our efforts to minimize the duration, cost and patient discomfort during DBS procedures and post-operative treatments, as well as our efforts to maximize the benefits of the procedure.

To do so, I will describe our electrophysiological studies in human patients undergoing DBS procedures and in non-human primates before and after induction of basal ganglia related disorders by MPTP (PD) and PCP (schizophrenia). I will describe our methods for automatic navigation to DBS targets, even under mild sedation. Finally, I will outline our suggested strategy for closed-loop adaptive DBS for PD, and will report of our early-stage efforts (or delusions) to treat the negative symptoms of schizophrenia by closed-loop DBS of the non-motor domains of the STN.