Abstract
Important technological advances in the last decades paved the road to a great success story for electrically stimulating medical implants, including cochlear implants or implants for deep brain stimulation. However, there are still many challenges in reducing side effects and improving functionality and comfort for the patient. Two of the main challenges are the wish for smaller implants on one hand, and the demand for more stimulation channels on the other hand. But these two aims lead to a conflict of interests. This paper presents a novel design for an electrical feedthrough, the so called capacitive feedthrough, which allows both reducing the size, and increasing the number of included channels. Capacitive feedthroughs combine the functionality of a coupling capacitor and an electrical feedthrough within one and the same structure. The paper also discusses the progress and the challenges of the first produced demonstrators. The concept bears a high potential in improving current feedthrough technology, and could be applied on all kinds of electrical medical implants, even if its implementation might be challenging.
Highlights
Neuromodulation has helped hundreds of thousands of patients so far, it is a very young and still developing technology
The implantable pulse generator (IPG) creates charge-balanced, biphasic stimulation signals. These signals are usually transmitted to the target tissue by electronic leads, which are connected to the IPG
The paper presented the new concept of capacitive feedthroughs
Summary
Neuromodulation has helped hundreds of thousands of patients so far, it is a very young and still developing technology. One coupling capacitor is integrated in every stimulation channel to fulfill two major safety functions At first, they are used to limit the maximum applied charge per pulse. Empirical studies derived a load density of 30 μC/cm2/phase as a maximum threshold for the charge density to avoid neural tissue damage by stimulation (Kuncel and Grill, 2004; Coffey, 2009). They prevent long-term charge-imbalanced stimulation, which could otherwise result in serious tissue damage (Coffey, 2009; Hauptmann et al, 2009)
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