GPS for Neurosurgeons: Advances in Treatment of Tremors

Biomedical engineering professor Cameron McIntyre’s research allows doctors to see a patient’s brain in three dimensions. Using this hologram, neurosurgeons can perform complex surgeries to alleviate the tremors associated with Parkinson’s disorder and epilepsy.

McIntyre’s research on this project is supported by two National Institutes of Health grants.

Transcript

CAMERON MCINTYRE: When I was a graduate student, I had the lucky opportunity to watch a deep brain stimulation surgery. It was very new thing at the time. This was almost 20, 25 years ago, and it was the most captivating thing I had ever seen. And the patient has these tremors and rigidity in their joints, and they turn on the stimulator and immediately their tremor goes away and their rigidity alleviates. I was blown away by this, and still to this day, I find it to be amazing. It's truly a miracle that this happens, and we still don't even know exactly how it happens and why it happens. How do we optimize it? But we're learning more all the time. Our laboratory works on deep brain stimulation technology, which is implanted neurotechnology that is used to treat neurological disorders. So that can be things like obsessive compulsive disorder, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease.

CAMERON MCINTYRE: And what we try to do is stimulate just the right part of the brain to treat dysfunctional brain circuits in an individual patient's brain. There's so many things that we know in basic science, but a lot of them are not especially relevant to the practicing clinician. So there's a trick of figuring out how do you boil down all of that scientific knowledge into something that is functionally useful for the neurosurgeon or for the neurologist? And one way that you can accomplish that is with three dimensional visualization. We take MRI images and we convert them into three dimensional computer models of each individual patient's brain, and then we use that to help us figure out where do we want the electrode to be implanted? And we're really concerned about the millimeter scale. That's the level of detail that we're trying to provide to the neurosurgeons. What excites me the most about the future of brain interfacing technology is that we're on the verge of actually being able to communicate with the brain and have the brain communicate back with us to then allow us to interact with many, many other disorders that we don't have great medical solutions for.

CAMERON MCINTYRE: We know that miracle outcomes are possible, but they don't happen for every single patient. So how do we make it so that every patient has that same kind of miracle outcome and do that in Parkinson's disease and do that in neuropsychiatric disease and do that in epilepsy? Those are the big goals that drive our research.