Predictive Modeling of Sleep Slow Oscillation Emergence on the electrode manifold: Toward Personalized Closed-Loop Brain Stimulation

Sleep slow oscillations (SOs), characteristic of NREM sleep, are causally tied to cognitive outcomes and the health-promoting homeostatic functions of sleep. Due to these known benefits, brain stimulation techniques aiming to enhance SOs are being developed, with great potential to contribute to clinical interventions, as they hold promise for improving sleep functions in populations with identified SO deficits (e.g., mild cognitive impairment). SO-targeting closed-loop stimulation protocols currently strive to identify SO occurrences in real time, a computationally intensive step that can lead to reduced precision (compared to post-hoc detection). These approaches are also often limited to focusing on only one electrode location, thus inherently precluding targeting of SOs that is informed by the overall organization of SOs in space-time. Prediction of SO emergence across the electrode manifold would establish an alternative to online detection, thus greatly advancing the development of personalized and flexible brain stimulation paradigms. This study presents a computational model that predicts SO occurrences at multiple locations across a night of sleep. In combination with our previous study on optimizing brain stimulation protocols using the spatiotemporal properties of SOs, this model contributes to increasing the accuracy of SO targeting in brain stimulation applications.