Inhibition of absence seizures in a reduced corticothalamic circuit via closed-loop control

Abstract

Inhibition of spike-wave discharges (SWD) was thought to be associated with remission of seizure symptoms in absence epilepsy. In the previous studies, pulse stimulation was applied directly to the brain as an effective means to inhibit SWD. However, this method not only failed to provide a real-time tracking control of the disease, but also caused incalculable damage to the patient's brain tissue. To fill the gap, this work studied the mitigation and elimination effects of SWD by applying single-pulse coordinated resetting stimulation (SCRS) to three different neurons, firstly. Secondly, based on the 2I:2O cortical-thalamic model (2I:2O SCT model), four kinds of m:n on-off SCRS with the same period were compared, and the control efficiency and impulse energy consumption were combined to investigate these different stimulations. Finally, we further optimized the regulation strategies, including the weighted structure of stimulation and closed-loop control. Simulation results show that the weighted stimulation and closed-loop control strategy proposed here further improve control performance by reducing energy consumption, which may be more reliable in applications. Moreover, this study provides a new method for optimizing SCRS by the weighted processing and closed-loop control of electrical pulses to alleviate the absence epileptic state.

Keywords

• spike-wave discharges
• weighted stimulation
• single-pulse coordinated reset stimulation
• closed-loop control