A PROOF-OF-CONCEPT STUDY OF DBS SENSING FOR COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an advanced neurosurgical treatment for movement disorders, most prominently essential tremor (ET) and Parkinson's disease (PD). DBS involves the implantation of one or more electrodes which can deliver precisely controlled electrical pulses to the surrounding
neural tissue, with the ventral intermediate nucleus of the thalamus (VIM) and the subthalamic nucleus
(STN) being common targets in ET and PD, respectively. The latest generation of DBS systems are now able to record and wirelessly stream neural activity - specifically, local field potentials (LFPs) which reflect the synchronized activity of populations of neurons - from implanted electrodes. This capability, known as DBS sensing, has been introduced to enable adaptive DBS where the stimulation adapts to the brain's state, but it also opens the door for asking fundamental questions about human brain function with a uniquely high level of spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we report a proof-of-concept study demonstrating the capabilities of DBS sensing for cognitive neuroscience, including time-frequency resolved task-based data collection in the lab, lab-based comparisons between DBS ON and OFF, and long-timescale tracking of LFP signals of interest as well as around self-triggered events after patients have returned home. Taking DBS sensing out of the clinic into a research setting has the potential to deliver unique insights into the function of otherwise difficult to reach subcortical brain regions in human cognition and behaviour as well as neural dynamics as they unfold in everyday life.