Abstract
Neural stimulation is a critical technique in treating neurological diseases and investigating brain functions. Traditional electrical stimulation uses electrodes to directly create intervening electric fields in the immediate vicinity of neural tissues. Second-generation stimulation techniques directly use light, magnetic fields or ultrasound in a non-contact manner. An emerging generation of non- or minimally invasive neural stimulation techniques is enabled by nanotechnology to achieve a high spatial resolution and cell-type specificity. In these techniques, a nanomaterial converts a remotely transmitted primary stimulus such as a light, magnetic or ultrasonic signal to a localized secondary stimulus such as an electric field or heat to stimulate neurons. The ease of surface modification and bio-conjugation of nanomaterials facilitates cell-type-specific targeting, designated placement and highly localized membrane activation. This review focuses on nanomaterial-enabled neural stimulation techniques primarily involving opto-electric, opto-thermal, magneto-electric, magneto-thermal and acousto-electric transduction mechanisms. Stimulation techniques based on other possible transduction schemes and general consideration for these emerging neurotechnologies are also discussed.
Highlights
Neural stimulation is an essential technique for restoring lost neural functions and correcting disordered neural circuits in neurological diseases (Hassler et al, 2010)
Conventional electrode-based, electrical neural stimulation is limited by the strong attenuation of electric fields through tissues and often requires surgical placement of the electrodes in an intimate contact to the target neural tissue (Cogan, 2008; Huang et al, 2010)
Transcranial magnetic stimulation only achieves a spatial resolution at the millimeter scale (Ro et al, 1999; Bolognini and Ro, 2010)
Summary
Neural stimulation is an essential technique for restoring lost neural functions and correcting disordered neural circuits in neurological diseases (Hassler et al, 2010). Localized heat stimulates a neuron through two proposed mechanisms: the thermal effect on the cell membrane (1) changes the membrane capacitance and/or (2) activates temperature-gated ion channels of the family of transient receptor potential vanilloid (TRPV) channels (Albert et al, 2012; Shapiro et al, 2012; Paviolo et al, 2014b) This class of nanomaterial-enabled neural stimulation schemes includes, but is not limited to, opto-electric transduction via quantum dots (QDs; Winter et al, 2001, 2005; Gomez et al, 2005; Pappas et al, 2007; Molokanova et al, 2008; Lugo et al, 2012; Bareket et al, 2014), opto-thermal transduction via gold nanomaterials (Paviolo et al, 2013, 2014a, 2015; Eom et al, 2014; Yong et al, 2014; Yoo et al, 2014; Carvalho-de-Souza et al, 2015), magneto-electric transduction via magneto-electric nanoparticles (Yue et al, 2012; Guduru et al, 2015), magnetothermal transduction via superparamagnetic nanoparticles (Huang et al, 2010; Stanley et al, 2012; Chen et al, 2015), and acousto-electric transduction via piezoelectric nanomaterials (Ciofani et al, 2010; Marino et al, 2015). Due to the limited tissue-penetrating capability of the blue light, this method is usually invasive, requiring the implantation of a light
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