Machine learning in deep brain stimulation: A systematic review

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an increasingly common therapy for a large range of neurological disorders, such as abnormal movement disorders. The effectiveness of DBS in terms of controlling patient symptomatology has made this procedure increasingly used over the past few decades. Concurrently, the popularity of Machine Learning (ML), a subfield of artificial intelligence, has skyrocketed and its influence has more recently extended to medical domains such as neurosurgery. Despite its growing research interest, there has yet to be a literature review specifically on the use of ML in DBS. We have followed a fully systematic methodology to obtain a corpus of 73 papers. In each paper, we identified the clinical application, the type/amount of data used, the method employed, and the validation strategy, further decomposed into 12 different sub-categories. The papers overall illustrated some existing trends in how ML is used in the context of DBS, including the breath of the problem domain and evolving techniques, as well as common frameworks and limitations. This systematic review analyzes at a broad level how ML have been recently used to address clinical problems on DBS, giving insight into how these new computational methods are helping to push the state-of-the-art of functional neurosurgery. DBS clinical workflow is complex, involves many specialists, and raises several clinical issues which have partly been addressed with artificial intelligence. However, several areas remain and those that have been recently addressed with ML are by no means considered "solved" by the community nor are they closed to new and evolving methods.