NeuroNetwork 15

Project titel: Non-Invasive Deep Brain Stimulation for Motor Disorders (NeeMo) Project leader: Philipp Ruhnau, Eike Budinger, Lisa Carius

At the moment, implanting electrodes into deep brain structures is the only therapeutic choice in patients with far progressed motor disorders such as Parkinson's disease. The implantation and therapy is rather risky and has a significant impact on the patients living quality. If it were possible to delay or even omit this surgery by means of a non-invasive therapy the health care system would benefit financially, but even more importantly patients would have improved live quality at a much lower risk.

The proposed Neuronetwork Neemo aims at the development, evaluation and optimization of a novel method for non-invasive brain stimulation with that clinical potential, which targets subcortical sources without affecting superficial cortical areas. In a recent, ground-breaking study is has recently been shown in rodents that deep brain stimulation is possible from the scalp, without surgery, by means of temporal interference [TI] (Grossman et al., 2017). The main goal of NeeMo is to make this method clinical usable for patients subject to motor disorders. We plan to evaluate the impact of TI on the subcortical motor system in rodents, human healthy subjects as well as patients with implanted deep brain electrodes, as well as using computer models and optimization procedures. The long-range goal is to make this method available from clinical application. To reach these goals NeeMo creates an interdisciplinary network comprised of researchers from the Department of Neurology, animal researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology and engineers from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. We are confident that our project can establish a novel technique with tremendous clinical potential.