Irregular optogenetic stimulation waveforms can induce naturalistic patterns of hippocampal spectral activity

Abstract

Objective: Therapeutic brain stimulation is conventionally delivered using constant-frequency stimulation pulses. Several recent clinical studies have explored how unconventional and irregular temporal stimulation patterns could enable better therapy. However, it is challenging to understand which irregular patterns are most effective for different therapeutic applications given the massively high-dimensional parameter space. Approach: Here we applied many irregular stimulation patterns in a single neural circuit to demonstrate how they can enable new dimensions of neural control compared to conventional stimulation, to guide future exploration of novel stimulation patterns in translational settings. We optogenetically excited the septohippocampal circuit with constant-frequency, nested pulse, sinusoidal, and randomized stimulation waveforms, systematically varying their amplitude and frequency parameters. Main results: We first found equal entrainment of hippocampal oscillations: all waveforms provided similar gamma-power increase, whereas no parameters increased theta-band power above baseline (despite the mechanistic role of the medial septum in driving hippocampal theta oscillations). We then compared each the effects of each waveform on high-dimensional multi-band activity states using dimensionality reduction methods. Strikingly, we found that conventional stimulation drove predominantly “artificial” (different from behavioral activity) effects, whereas all irregular waveforms induced activity patterns that more closely resembled behavioral activity. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that irregular stimulation patterns are not useful where the desired therapeutic mechanism is to suppress or enhance a single frequency band. However, novel stimulation patterns may provide the greatest benefit for neurological conditions where entraining a mixture of bands (e.g. if they are associated with different symptoms) or desired behaviorally relevant neural states is a potential therapeutic mechanism.