Learning to evoke complex motor outputs with spatiotemporal neurostimulation using a hierarchical and adaptive optimization algorithm

The development of neurostimulation techniques to evoke motor patterns is an active area of research. It serves as a crucial experimental tool to probe computation in neural circuits, and it has applications in neuroprostheses used to aid recovery of function after stroke or injury. There are two important challenges when designing algorithms to unveil and control neurostimulation-to-motor mappings, thereby linking spatiotemporal patterns of neural stimulation to muscle activation: (1) the exploration of motor maps needs to be fast and efficient (exhaustive search is to be avoided for clinical and experimental reasons) (2) online learning needs to be flexible enough to track ongoing changes in these maps. We propose a stimulation search algorithm to address these issues, and demonstrate its efficacy with experiments in non-human primate models. Our solution is a novel iterative process using Bayesian Optimization via Gaussian Processes on increasingly complex signal spaces. We show that our algorithm can successfully and rapidly learn mappings between complex stimulation patterns and evoked muscle activation patterns, where standard approaches fail. Importantly, we uncover nonlinear circuit-level computations in M1 that would not have been possible to identify using conventional mapping techniques.