Description:
- Treatment of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and stroke, to restore cognitive function to damaged brain tissue
Abstract
Researchers at USC have developed a highly configurable multi-channel stimulator which can generate any arbitrary spatiotemporal stimulation pattern in real time. Additionally, the stimulation is synchronized with a set of serially controlled CMOS switches to completely block the stimulation from the measurement, providing the first artifact-free DBS platform.
Benefit
- Artifact-free DBS
- Smaller and less power consuming than current state-of-the-art
- Highly configurable
Market Application
Neuromodulation technology, in which therapeutic deep brain stimulation (DBS) is used to disrupt brain activity, is used to treat many movement and neuropsychiatric disorders. Here, synchronous, fixed-interval trains of electrical pulses are sent from a small number of channels directly to brain tissue. Such a unidirectional process cannot be used to treat neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s or stroke, which are accompanied by damaged or diseased brain tissue. Rather, a closed-loop system must be used to bypass the afflicted areas and instead stimulate its surroundings to reestablish cognitive function. This necessitates cortical prosthesis capable of real-time delivery of precise, large-scale spatiotemporal patterns of asynchronous electric pulses to mimic the neural code. Though several prototypes have been proposed, current methods are severely impeded by (1) limitations in the type of stimuli they generate, and (2) collection artifacts due to the difficulty in removing the stimulation signal.
Publications
A Closed-Loop Multi-Channel Asynchronous Neurostimulator to Mimic Neural Code for Cognitive Prosthesis
Other
- Working prototype
- In vivo studies to follow