Adaptive Recruitment Curve Analysis Using Bayesian Modeling

Overview

The purpose of this study is to better understand how electrical or magnetic stimulation affect the nervous system by optimizing the way researchers measure muscle responses. The relationship between stimulation intensity and muscle response is described by "neural recruitment curves," which are critical for monitoring the state of the nervous system during therapies like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and spinal cord stimulation (SCS). This study tests a new, real-time computational approach based on our previously developed methods (Hierarchical Bayesian models) to estimate these recruitment curves more efficiently. The primary goal is to use this model to dynamically guide the experiment, automatically selecting the optimal stimulation intensities to test. The investigators hypothesize that this optimized approach will accurately estimate the entire recruitment curve, or specific targets components of it like the motor threshold, using significantly fewer samples than standard methods. By reducing the number of measurements required, this approach aims to decrease experimental time and minimize participant burden, making future TMS and SCS therapies and experiments more feasible and efficient.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation and other types of neurostimulation play a crucial role in advancing the understanding and manipulation of neural activity for both research and therapeutic purposes. The proposed approach to sampling recruitment curves in real-time promises to significantly improve the efficiency and precision of experiments that use electrical or electromagnetic stimulation techniques, reducing the experimental burden for participants as well as experimenters. By enhancing experimental efficiency in multiple experimental settings and techniques, this research directly contributes to accelerating the translation of scientific discoveries into clinical applications. This study will benchmark the relative performance of different methods against each other by testing existing and proposed algorithms using neurostimulation in people, and comparing the resultant estimates in recruitment curve parameters.