MEGIN Masterclass

MEG to gain insight into Parkinson’s disease and its treatment

Presented by Esther Florin, Lichtenburg Professor for Systems Neuroscience.

Register to watch this free webinar on-demand. A link to watch the Masterclass will then be emailed to you shortly after.

Abstract: “Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an invasive treatment option for neurological and psychiatric disorders, which can improve the patient’s quality of life to a great extent. Despite its clinically established use, for example, for Parkinson’s disease (PD), its underlying mechanism is still unclear. To better understand the mechanisms of DBS, its influence on whole-brain activity needs to be investigated. To gain a further understanding of medication and DBS effects, we recorded MEG in combination with simultaneous local field potentials as well as deep brain stimulation in patients with PD. However, DBS produces large artifacts due to the applied current and the electrode itself in MEG and EEG data. Therefore, I will first present approaches to mitigate these artifacts to achieve insights into the mechanisms of deep brain stimulation.

Using both classical evoked responses as well as data-driven dynamic network approaches, I will present insights from MEG recordings into PD and its treatment: On the one hand, we could identify a network related to the adverse effects of medication, and on the other hand, we identified cortical responses related to optimal treatment with DBS. These findings might in the future help clinicians to better identify optimal stimulation settings.”

Bio: Esther Florin is a Lichtenberg professor in Düsseldorf, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her group’s research focus is on neural connectivity to understand cognition and behavior in healthy subjects and neurological patients. For these aims, she uses MEG in combination with invasive recordings and stimulation. She is a PI within the main German collaborative research center on movement disorders and deep brain stimulation.