Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease (after Alzheimer’s) and the fastest-growing neurological disease in the world. L-dopa, still the mainstay of current treatment, has been available for over 50yrs. While there is an excellent and robust response to L-dopa early in the disease, it has limitations, and despite numerous attempts, there is no disease-modifying treatment. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a proven therapy, but it is necessarily invasive, has limited access, and is restricted to large centres. New treatments are being explored via non-invasive neuromodulation. Current methods for non-invasive neuromodulation all suffer from modest effect sizes and substantial between-subject variability of response. I will discuss how we are exploring Machine Learning approaches to design precision stimuli for Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) as a potential treatment for PD. I will also describe the emerging area of Low-Intensity Focussed Ultrasound Stimulation (LiFUS) as a novel treatment for PD. Finally, I will discuss our work on the automated privacy-compliant assessment of PD based on machine learning algorithms applied to video recordings, which will: 1) allow for quantification of disease severity for clinical trials of new therapies, 2) facilitate the remote assessment of people with PD, and screen for Parkinsonian features such as depression and sialorrhea, 3) empower people with PD to be able to track their own disease, 4) streamline visits in the clinic, allowing the clinician to focus on other factors that may affect quality of life (e.g. non-motor symptoms), and 5) allow for non-expert clinicians to automatically assess disease severity. Crucially, we explore the case when expert clinicians’ manual labelling of videos used to train the models may be inaccurate.

Dr. McKeown is the John Nichol Chair in Parkinson’s Research, Professor in the Department of Medicine, and adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada. The PPRC is deemed an International Centre of Excellence by the (US-based) Parkinson’s Foundation. He did his Engineering Physics, Medicine and Neurology training at McMaster University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Western Ontario, respectively. He did a 3yr research fellowship at the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego before being hired as an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. He was recruited to UBC in 2003.

He has been Principal Investigator for a variety of peer-reviewed research projects funded through the National Institute of Health (US-NIH), the Parkinson's Foundation (US-PF), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the International Association of Translational Neuroscience, and the (US) Whitaker Foundation. He was a member of the Neuroscience A (NSA) Canadian CIHR Scientific peer review committee as well as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Parkinson’s Society of Canada. Dr. McKeown has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters.

He is currently the Medical Advisor to the Parkinson’s Society of BC, and Chair, Research and Clinical Advisory Committee, Parkinson Canada. In addition to his clinical management of Parkinson’s Disease, his research interests include privacy-compliant video monitoring technologies for Parkinson’s disease and non-invasive neuromodulation as a novel treatment for Parkinson’s disease.