Deep Learning-Driven EEG Analysis for Personalized Deep Brain Stimulation Programming in Parkinson’s Disease

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an invasive procedure used to alleviate motor symptoms in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients. While brain activity can be used to optimise DBS parameters, the impact of DBS parameters on brain activity remains unclear. We aimed to identify the cortical neural response to changes in DBS parameters, which are sensitive to the effect of small changes in the stimulation parameters and could be used as neural biomarkers. We recorded in-clinic EEG data from seven hemispheres of PD patients during DBS programming sessions.

Here we developed a siamese adaptation of the EEGNet deep learning architecture and trained it to distinguish whether two short (1-sec-long) segments of brain activity were taken with the same stimulation parameters, or if either the strength or location of the stimulation had changed. 13 independent models were trained independently in each hemisphere for stimulation amplitude or contact, and all achieved high accuracy with an average of 78%. Our models are sensitive to changes in brain activity recorded at the scalp of the patients following changes as small as 0.3mA in the DBS parameters.

Next, we interpreted what our black-box AI models learned with an ablation-based explainability method, that extracts frequency bands learned by the models through a perturbation of the input’s frequency spectrum. We found that fast Narrow-Band Gamma oscillations (60-90Hz), contributed most to the models across all 7 hemispheres.

This work, using a data-driven approach, joins a recent body of evidence suggesting cortical Narrow-Band Gamma activity as the potential range for digital biomarkers for DBS optimization.