Predicting in vivo MRI Gradient-Field Induced Voltage Levels on Implanted Deep Brain Stimulation Systems Using Neural Networks

INTRODUCTION: MRI gradient-fields may induce extrinsic voltage between electrodes and conductive neurostimulator enclosure of implanted deep brain stimulation (DBS) systems, and may cause unintended stimulation and/or malfunction. Electromagnetic (EM) simulations using detailed anatomical human models, therapy implant trajectories, and gradient coil models can be used to calculate clinically relevant induced voltage levels. Incorporating additional anatomical human models into the EM simulation library can help to achieve more clinically relevant and accurate induced voltage levels, however, adding new anatomical human models and developing implant trajectories is time-consuming, expensive and not always feasible. METHODS: MRI gradient-field induced voltage levels are simulated in six adult human anatomical models, along clinically relevant DBS implant trajectories to generate the dataset. Predictive artificial neural network (ANN) regression models are trained on the simulated dataset. Leave-one-out cross validation is performed to assess the performance of ANN regressors and quantify model prediction errors. RESULTS: More than 180,000 unique gradient-induced voltage levels are simulated. ANN algorithm with two fully connected layers is selected due to its superior generalizability compared to support vector machine and tree-based algorithms in this particular application. The ANN regression model is capable of producing thousands of gradient-induced voltage predictions in less than a second with mean-squared-error less than 200 mV. CONCLUSION: We have integrated machine learning (ML) with computational modeling and simulations and developed an accurate predictive model to determine MRI gradient-field induced voltage levels on implanted DBS systems.