Antidepressant Deep Brain Stimulation
Neural implant technology is advancing rapidly. One of the first successful neural implant techniques, deep brain stimulation (DBS), has shown clinical efficacy across various disorders - including Parkinson’s Disease and Major Depression. DBS is now over 50 years old, works surprisingly well (see twitter thread), and is being commercialized… But we don’t have a clear idea of how it works.
My MD/PhD was focused on reverse-engineering antidepressant DBS in patients that benefited from it. Under the mentorship of Dr. Helen Mayberg and Dr. Robert Butera I used signal processing and control theory to better understand how brain, emotion/mood, and DBS were all linked together through the brain’s rhythmic activity.
Dissertation
A broad view of my MD/PhD work is best seen through my dissertation. The dissertation itself is available online, and a Twitter thread summarized the main points.
Core Results
Each of the main results of my research are present in separate project repositories:
- Mismatch Compression paper, code
- Depression Readout from SCC paper, code
- Network Action of SCCwm paper, code
DBSpace
A core library called DBSpace was developed for model-based DBS analyses and is available on
PyPi.
The code is opensource at
github.
