Potential benefits of automating deep brain stimulation programming in Parkinson’s disease

Although deep brain stimulation is known to be successful in controlling motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease, at present, there is a lack of consensus over which parameters to stimulate resulting in a time-consuming trial and error process.
Standard of care stimulation improved mean Movement Disorder Society-Sponsored Revision of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale part III (MDS-UPDRS-III) scores from 47.3 to 24.7. The StimFit algorithm improved mean MDS-UPDRS-III scores to 26.3, establishing non-inferiority.
The authors concluded that automated data-driven algorithms can predict optimal stimulation parameters for control of motor symptoms, reducing current treatment times associated with current standard of care.