Multi-task learning for subthalamic nucleus identification in deep brain stimulation

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of Subthalamic nucleus (STN) is the most successful treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. Localization of the STN through Microelectrode recordings (MER) is a key step during the surgery. However, it is a complex task even for a skilled neurosurgeon. Different researchers have developed methodologies for processing and classification of MER signals to locate the STN. Previous works employ the classical paradigm of supervised classification, assuming independence between patients. The aim of this paper is to introduce a patient-dependent learning scenario, where the predictive ability for STN identification at the level of a particular patient, can be used to improve the accuracy for STN identification in other patients. Our inspiration is the multi-task learning framework, that has been receiving increasing interest within the machine learning community in the last few years. To this end, we employ the multi-task Gaussian processes framework that exhibits state of the art performance in multi-task learning problems. In our context, we assume that each patient undergoing DBS is a different task, and we refer to the method as multi-patient learning. We show that the multi-patient learning framework improves the accuracy in the identification of STN in a range from 4.1 to 7.7%, compared to the usual patient-independent setup, for two different datasets. Given that MER are non stationary and noisy signals. Traditional approaches in machine learning fail to recognize accurately the STN during DBS. By contrast in our proposed method, we properly exploit correlations between patients with similar diseases, obtaining an additional information. This information allows to improve the accuracy not only for locating STN for DBS but also for other biomedical signal classification problems.