Controlling Populations of Neurons

It has been hypothesized that tremors associated with Parkinson's disease result from pathologically synchronized neural activity in the motor control region of the brain, and that deep brain stimulation (DBS) relieves the tremors by desynchronizing these neurons. With the goal of improving such treatment of Parkinson's disease, we have been using optimal control theory to develop DBS stimuli which achieve desynchronization of neural populations using less power than present implementations. This includes the development of a procedure for finding an energy-optimal stimulus which gives a positive Lyapunov exponent, and hence desynchronization, for a neural population. This uses less energy than recently proposed methods, and suggests a powerful alternative to pulsatile stimuli for DBS.