BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Netw. Physiol.
Sec. Networks in the Brain System
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnetp.2025.1674935
This article is part of the Research TopicStimulation Strategies Targeting Plasticity Mechanisms in Diseased Brain NetworksView all 9 articles
Computational Analysis of Two Novel Deep Brain Stimulation Pulsing Patterns on a Thalamocortical Network Model of Parkinson's Disease
Provisionally accepted
AmirAli Farokhniaee1*
Siavash Amiri2- 1McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
- 2Didab PVT Ltd Co., Tehran, Iran
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Deep brain stimulation (DBS) at high frequencies has revolutionized the efforts in alleviating Parkinson's disease symptoms since about 30 years ago. There has been a vast investigation in resolving DBS mechanisms of action since then. Recently, synaptic suppression turned out to have a pivotal role in basic mechanisms of action of DBS. Based on this understanding, researchers introduced two novel methods of DBS pulsing strategy with the minimum number of stimuli. In contrary to the conventional DBS (cDBS) pulsing that uses nonstop pulses at high frequencies (> 100 Hz), the two novel methods contained changes in the pulsing frequency, and on/off pulsing periods. In this computational study, we investigated the network effects of the two suggested patterns on an updated version of the biophysically realistic thalamocortical network model of DBS. Both suggested pulsing patterns reduced the exaggerated beta power (~13-30 Hz oscillations) in the motor cortex significantly, with careful consideration of the intensity of the stimulating pulses. In addition, they reduced the amount of network synchronization significantly. We compared these findings with the effects of 20 and 130 Hz cDBS on our network model and did not find contrary global effects to 130 Hz cDBS. The two suggested patterns that are found to be computationally successful in manifesting known DBS network effects, could potentially increase DBS device battery life and reduce microlesion effect due to cDBS pulsing in long term, to be confirmed in further studies.
Keywords: Deep Brain Stimulation, beta power, Morgera's index of synchronization, thalamocortical network, spiking neural networks, short-term synaptic plasticity, Parkinson's disease, Network physiology
Received: 28 Jul 2025; Accepted: 23 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Farokhniaee and Amiri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: AmirAli Farokhniaee, aafarokh@gmail.com
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