Automizing deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s Disease

January 22nd, 2025

Despite being an established therapy for Parkinson’s Disease, deep brain stimulation (DBS) still relies on a manual trial-and-error procedure to achieve clinical efficacy for the patient. ANLIVA® DBS is a medical device that employs sophisticated mathematical modeling aiming to significantly improve treatment outcomes and enhance the cost-effectiveness of DBS.

In DBS, electrical pulses are delivered to neural targets deep inside the brain through implanted electrodes to alleviate motor symptoms. To achieve a successful outcome, the stimulation must be adjusted effectively to maximize the symptom relief while avoiding DBS-induced side effects – a process that is currently done in a time-consuming calibration procedure, both burdening the patient and healthcare resources.

Intensity-based segmentation of an MR image to identify grey matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid is used to obtain patient-specific conductivity models for DBS simulation

The animation below demonstrates the optimized activation field in Deep Brain Stimulation targeting the subthalamic nucleus (STN) motor region in Parkinson’s Disease (PD).  By optimizing the electric field to precisely target the STN motor, the motor symptoms of PD are addressed while minimizing potential side-effects.

ANLIVA® DBS is intended to automate the process of tailoring DBS by mathematically predicting clinically efficacious DBS settings by employing a digital twin strategy based on patient-specific neural imaging data, where the stimulation is computationally optimized with respect to neural targets.

ANLIVA DBS is targeting the US market with FDA 510(k) clearance and is expected to be on the market in 2026.