In the late 1990s, Cameron McIntyre was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University working on the biophysics of deep brain stimulation. It was a field that was both cutting-edge and primitive – so new that even the clinicians using the technology didn’t entirely understand exactly how it worked, just that stimulating different brain regions at different frequencies yielded positive results for some patients.
Pondering the mysteries of the process, McIntyre tackled the issue from an engineering standpoint to better understand and control the mechanics of the process. Three decades later, his current work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and deep brain stimulation uses emergent AI technology to manage the process in ways that were unimaginable not too many years ago.
“In many ways, the concepts involved in this are quite old,” says McIntyre. “The work we’re doing now is the marriage of neuroscience and biophysics. Devices use electrical fields to modulate brain tissue and networks and activate patterns. We’ve been digging into questions like what are the biophysical effects in the brain, how do we change electrode locations or signal strength to change the biophysical response?”
From an early emphasis on treating movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, deep brain stimulation has expanded to other conditions. For now, at least, treatments amount to locating a misfiring brain network and treating the malady by disrupting the network enough to block its malfunction. But advances beyond that are on the horizon, with restoration of function to the misfiring brain network as the ultimate goal.
“The cool thing, which we hope to get to someday, is to stimulate that dysfunctional network in a way that gets it back to normal,” says McIntyre. “And that’s where artificial intelligence comes in. The whole point of AI is pattern recognition, and its big promise is the ability to ‘read’ brain activity patterns and write back into them in ways that will correct malfunctioning networks.”
So far, McIntyre’s work shows particular promise in the treatment of movement disorders involving tremors, such as dystonia and, especially, Parkinson’s disease. Eventually, deep brain stimulation might also have applications for treating epilepsy, depression, Alzheimer’s or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“The common thread in all of them is that they can all be tied back to dysfunctional networks in the brain, which has thousands of different networks doing different things,” says McIntyre. “At some point in a disease, a network goes awry.”