A real-time rodent neural interface for deciphering acute pain signals from neuronal ensemble spike activity

Abstract

In recent years, brain machine interfaces have attracted accumulating interest with goals to map, assist, augment or repair the cognitive or sensory-motor functions of human and animal brains. Pain is a common experience in our daily lives. Developing a demand-based pain management or modulation system requires timely detection of pain signals and temporally precise, effective neuromodulation. To improve our understanding of neural mechanisms of nociceptive pain, we developed a novel rodent neural interface to study the role of neural circuits for encoding acute pain. Our neural interface is aimed at integrating (i) the detection of acute pain signals based on simultaneously recorded ensemble spike activity from multiple brain areas and (ii) neuromodulation based on the closed-loop feedback. The current paper focuses on the detection of pain signals using neural ensemble spike activity.