PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Electrical stimulation is a key tool in neuroscience, both in brain mapping studies and in many therapeutic applications such as cochlear, vestibular, and retinal neural implants. Due to safety considerations, stimulation is restricted to short biphasic pulses. Despite decades of research and development, neural implants lead to varying restoration of function in patients. In this study, we use computational modeling to provide an explanation for how pulsatile stimulation affects axonal channels and therefore leads to variability in restoration of neural responses. The phenomenological explanation is transformed into equations that predict induced firing rate as a function of pulse rate, pulse amplitude, and spontaneous firing rate. We show that these equations predict simulated responses to pulsatile stimulation with a variety of parameters as well as several features of experimentally recorded primate vestibular afferent responses to pulsatile stimulation. We then discuss the implications of these effects for improving clinical stimulation paradigms and electrical stimulation-based experiments.
摘要：
电刺激是神经科学的关键工具,无论是在大脑绘图研究和许多治疗应用，如耳蜗，前庭,和视网膜神经植入物。出于安全考虑,刺激仅限于短的双相脉冲。尽管经过几十年的研究和开发，神经植入物导致患者不同的功能恢复。在这项研究中,我们使用计算模型来解释搏动刺激如何影响轴突通道，从而导致神经反应恢复的变异性。现象学的解释被转化为方程，该方程预测诱导激发率作为脉搏率的函数，脉冲幅度,和自发放电率。我们表明，这些方程可以预测具有多种参数的对脉动刺激的模拟响应，以及实验记录的灵长类动物前庭传入对脉动刺激的响应的几个特征。然后，我们讨论了这些效应对改善临床刺激范例和基于电刺激的实验的影响。
