This is a model of exaggerated beta rhythm observed in the motor cortex, similar to animal and humans with Parkinson’s disease. It is obtained by manually changing the specific cortical, thalamic and thalamocortical synaptic connections, motivated by the previous studies in the field. More importantly and in addition, it serves as a thalamocortical network model of deep brain stimulation, a therapy used for Parkinson’s disease. We computationally stimulated the layer 5 pyramidal neurons of the cortex by direct injected currents to those pyramidal cells and observed well-known patterns in experimental studies, such as attenuation of the exaggerated beta rhythm, formation of excited and inhibited clusters of neurons in the motor cortex and the optimum value for the stimulation, both in amplitude and frequency domains, to obtain the most attenuated beta rhythm.
Model Type: Realistic Network
Region(s) or Organism(s): Thalamus; Neocortex
Cell Type(s): Abstract Izhikevich neuron; Neocortex layer 5 pyramidal cell
Model Concept(s): Beta oscillations; Deep brain stimulation
Simulation Environment: MATLAB
Implementer(s): Farokhniaee, AmirAli [aafarokh at gmail.com]
References:
Farokhniaee A, Lowery MM. (2021). Cortical network effects of subthalamic deep brain stimulation in a thalamo-cortical microcircuit model. Journal of neural engineering. 18 [PubMed]