Characteristics extraction and analysis on the electrical signals of spinal dorsal root nerve evoked by acupuncture manipulations

Abstract

The effect mechanism of acupuncture is closely related to neural system. When stimulated by different acupuncture manipulations, the neural system can evoke different electrical signals, because the excited receptors and nerve fiber types are different. As to nervous system, information encoding is in the time mode and frequency mode of spike trains. Power spectrum analysis, histogram statistic and some other traditional analysis methods might miss a lot of important information. In order to extract characteristics and analyze regularities of electrical signals evoked by different acupuncture manipulations, and explore new methods for the objectification and quantization study of acupuncture manipulations, wavelet-entropy combined method and interspace intervals (ISI) series were employed to analyze the characteristics of electrical signals of spinal dorsal root fine nerve bundle evoked by stimulating Zusanli point (ST36) on normal rats with different acupuncture manipulation methods, which were rotate-twirl methods (Rt), including rotate-twirl reinforcing method (Rtf) and rotate-twirl reducing method (Rtd), lift-thrust methods (Lt), mainly as lift-thrust reinforcing method (Ltf) and lift-thrust reducing method (Ltd). Integrated analysis with multi-parameter has preliminarily classified and discriminated the characteristics of electrical signals evoked by different acupuncture manipulations.