An Implantable Peripheral Nerve Recording and Stimulation System for Experiments on Freely Moving Animal Subjects

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 6115 - 12
• Main Authors: Lee, Byunghun, Koripalli, Mukhesh K., Jia, Yaoyao, Acosta, Joshua, Sendi, M. S. E., Choi, Yoonsu, Ghovanloo, Maysam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 17.04.2018; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/378/1959/2605; 631/378/2632/2634; 9/10; Action Potentials; Animals; Cameras; Computer engineering; Data acquisition; Electric Stimulation - instrumentation; Electrical engineering; Electrodes, Implanted; Equipment Design; Experiments; Humanities and Social Sciences; Interfaces; Movement; multidisciplinary; Nervous system; Prostheses and Implants; Rats; Recording; Sciatic nerve; Sciatic Nerve - physiology; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Transplants & implants; Wireless Technology - instrumentation
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-24465-1

A new study with rat sciatic nerve model for peripheral nerve interfacing is presented using a fully-implanted inductively-powered recording and stimulation system in a wirelessly-powered standard homecage that allows animal subjects move freely within the homecage. The Wireless Implantable Neural Recording and Stimulation (WINeRS) system offers 32-channel peripheral nerve recording and 4-channel current-controlled stimulation capabilities in a 3 × 1.5 × 0.5 cm 3 package. A bi-directional data link is established by on-off keying pulse-position modulation (OOK-PPM) in near field for narrow-band downlink and 433 MHz OOK for wideband uplink. An external wideband receiver is designed by adopting a commercial software defined radio (SDR) for a robust wideband data acquisition on a PC. The WINeRS-8 prototypes in two forms of battery-powered headstage and wirelessly-powered implant are validated in vivo , and compared with a commercial system. In the animal study, evoked compound action potentials were recorded to verify the stimulation and recording capabilities of the WINeRS-8 system with 32-ch penetrating and 4-ch cuff electrodes on the sciatic nerve of awake freely-behaving rats. Compared to the conventional battery-powered system, WINeRS can be used in closed-loop recording and stimulation experiments over extended periods without adding the burden of carrying batteries on the animal subject or interrupting the experiment.