ViSE Seminar Series: Temporal Patterns of Deep Brain Stimulation: From Mechanisms to Improved Therapy, SC 5326, Thursday March 13, 11:50. Refreshments provided.
Title: Temporal Patterns of Deep Brain Stimulation: From Mechanisms to Improved Therapy
Speaker: Warren M. Grill, Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Neurobiology, and Surgery, Duke University
Date: Thursday, March 13th, 2014
Time: Noon start, 11:50 lunch social
Place: Stevenson Center 5326
Abstract:
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has developed from an experimental technique to an established therapy for the treatment of movement disorders including dystonia, essential tremor, and Parkinson’s disease. High-frequency stimulation results in outcomes similar to those resulting from ablative surgical lesions of target structures in the thalamus or basal ganglia, but debate remains over the effects of high frequency stimulation on neuronal and network activity.
Our previous computational and experimental studies that illuminated the cellular effects of DBS motivated a hypothesis that DBS acts by regularizing the activity in populations of neurons in the stimulated nucleus. I will present data from experiments in persons with Parkinson’s disease that demonstrate the importance of the regularization of neuronal activity in the clinical efficacy of DBS in treatment of bradykinesia. This regularization acts to mask the patterns of pathological activity that are present in the basal ganglia and thalamus in movement disorders. This new understanding has important implications for novel methods of stimulation, and I will present the design and clinical evaluation of novel temporal patterns of stimulation. The results demonstrate the utility of an entirely new dimension of neural stimulation parameters – the timing between stimulation pulses – to increase the efficacy and efficiency of stimulation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Collaborators on this work include David Brocker, Chuck Dorval, Brandon Swan, and Dennis Turner at Duke University, Robert Gross at Emory University, Stephen Tatter at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and Mandy Miller Koop and Helen Bronte-Stewart at Stanford University. This work is supported by NIH grant R01 NS040894.
About Warren Grill:
Warren M. Grill is the Addy Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, with secondary appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Neurobiology, and Surgery. Dr. Grill received the B.S. degree in biomedical engineering with honors in 1989 from Boston University and the Ph.D. in biomedical engineering in 1995 from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.
Professor Grill teaches courses on circuits and instrumentation, bioelectricity, and on the fundamentals and applications of electrical stimulation. In 2008 received the Capers & Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research at Duke University, in 2009 was inducted into the Bass Society of Fellows at Duke for excellence in teaching and research, and in 2013 was awarded Outstanding Postdoc Mentor at Duke University.
His research interests are in neural engineering and neural prostheses and include design and testing of electrodes and stimulation techniques, the electrical properties of tissues and cells, and computational neuroscience with applications to restoration of bladder function, treatment of movement disorders with deep brain stimulation, and electrical stimulation for treatment of pain. He has published over 130 peer reviewed journal articles and 17 book chapters, and has been awarded 14 US patents.
He is Co-Founder, Director, and Chief Scientific Officer of NDI Medical, a medical device incubator, Director and Chief Scientific Advisor at SPR Therapeutics, which has developed a novel therapy for treating pain, and Co-Founder, Director, and Chief Scientific Officer of DBI, which is commercializing a novel approach to brain stimulation for neurological disorders.
Dr. Grill serves as a Consultant to the Neurological Devices Panel of the FDA Medical Devices Advisory Committee, a member of the Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Prosthetics and Special-Disabilities Program, and on the editorial boards of Brain Stimulation and Journal of Neural Engineering.
He was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2007 and as a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society in 2011.