A Bidirectional Neuromodulation Technology for Nerve Recording and Stimulation.

Jian Xu,Hongsun Guo,Anh Nguyen,Zhi Yang,Hubert Lim

doi:10.3390/mi9110538

Abstract

Electrical nerve recording and stimulation technologies are critically needed to monitor and modulate nerve activity to treat a variety of neurological diseases. However, current neuromodulation technologies presented in the literature or commercially available products cannot support simultaneous recording and stimulation on the same nerve. To solve this problem, a new bidirectional neuromodulation system-on-chip (SoC) is proposed in this paper, which includes a frequency-shaping neural recorder and a fully integrated neural stimulator with charge balancing capability. In addition, auxiliary circuits consisting of power management and data transmission circuits are designed to provide the necessary power supply for the SoC and the bidirectional data communication between the SoC and an external computer via a universal serial bus (USB) interface, respectively. To achieve sufficient low input noise for sensing nerve activity at a sub-10 V range, several noise reduction techniques are developed in the neural recorder. The designed SoC was fabricated in a 0.18 m high-voltage Bipolar CMOS DMOS (BCD) process technology that was described in a previous publication and it has been recently tested in animal experiments that demonstrate the proposed SoC is capable of achieving reliable and simultaneous electrical stimulation and recording on the same nerve.

Highlights

Electroceuticals is a new research area in bioelectronics that aims to create implants, including chips that are as small as a grain of rice, and the implants are expected to simultaneously monitor and modulate nerve activity to treat diseases and augment or replace drugs [1,2,3,4]
This suggests that electrical stimulation may activate the sciatic nerve, which initially propagates towards the spinal cord
These data demonstrate the powerful capabilities of our stimulation and recording system in sensing low amplitude neural signals and conduction delays in sub-populations of nerve fibers using simple non-invasive wire electrodes around the sciatic nerve, which is enabled by the low noise properties of our device

Summary

Introduction

Electroceuticals is a new research area in bioelectronics that aims to create implants, including chips that are as small as a grain of rice, and the implants are expected to simultaneously monitor and modulate nerve activity to treat diseases and augment or replace drugs [1,2,3,4]. To minimize side effects and optimize treatment, the stimulation levels could be titrated to the lowest levels required to elicit the desired spiking activity along the ascending and/or descending vagus nerve and to elicit specific firing patterns in the nerve relevant for treatment Another example is in providing better neural prosthetics to amputees for controlling robotic hands by monitoring motor and sensory neural activity from ulnar and median nerves to control the hand movements as well as electrically stimulate the nerves to restore sensory sensations and feedback based on the recorded signals. There are three limitations that prevent chronically stable nerve recording and stimulation

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Results

Conclusion