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.