Peripheral Nerve Interfaces: Design, Fabrication, and Reliability
Sensing the electrical activity of peripheral nerves with high spatial resolution is needed to accurately capture dynamic and detailed movement intent of amputees and could be helpful to adapt the treatment of other disease states through closed-loop neuromodulation of bioelectronic medicines. However, existing nerve interfaces have designs that significantly limit recording performance and have not been shown to maintain functional integrity during chronic implantation (i.e., years-decades). I will discuss our attempts to address these limitations through improvements to interface design, fabrication, and packaging. Our primary neural interface combines micromachined neural interfaces with tissue-engineered hydrogel-based scaffolds. These tissue-engineered electronic nerve interfaces (TEENI) enable highly scalable nerve interfaces that provide significant interface-design freedom. We use a high-temperature reactive-accelerated-aging (RAA) soak test utilizing hydrogen peroxide as a source of reactive oxygen species to reveal failure mechanisms and accelerate the development of robust microfabrication and packaging processes. Chronic electrophysiological experiments demonstrate high-SNR recording performance for implanted TEENI devices and full tissue histology (e.g., CLARITY) and immunohistochemistry demonstrate robust neural regeneration throughout the device. I will also discuss collaborations on osseointegrated neural interfaces (ONI) and monolithic silicon carbide based probe arrays.
The talk will be given in english.
More about Cary Kuisasha: www.img.ufl.edu/people/cary-kuliasha