Internal KCN: Inferring Short-term Synaptic Plasticity Characteristics from in-vivo Recordings of Parkinsonian Patients

TITLE: Inferring Short-term Synaptic Plasticity Characteristics from in-vivo Recordings of Parkinsonian Patients

ABSTRACT: Parkinson’s disease is a debilitating neurological disorder that affects more than 6.2 million people globally. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is one of the most successful treatment methods, however, due to its unknown mechanism of action, it has a few defects. To develop DBS, it is essential to understand its underlying mechanism. Therefore, we hypothesize that DBS ameliorates the PD symptoms by modulating short-term synaptic plasticity. To investigate this idea, we designed a method for inferring characteristics of STP from micro-electrode recordings during DBS implantation surgery. The results are promising especially in fitting to the experimental data. However, we conclude that due to the inconsistency of different parameters of each stimulation rate, there should be another rate-dependent phenomenon affecting our results.