Hofmann Lorenz, Ebert Martin, Tass Peter Alexander, Hauptmann Christian
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine - Neuromodulation (INM-7), Forschungszentrum Jülich Jülich, Germany.
Front Neuroeng. 2011 Sep 28;4:9. doi: 10.3389/fneng.2011.00009. eCollection 2011.
The electrical stimulation of neuronal structures is used as a treatment for many neurological disorders, e.g., for the treatment of Parkinson's disease via deep brain stimulation (DBS). To reduce side effects, to avoid tissue or electrode damage, and to increase battery lifetimes, an effective but gentle electrical stimulation is of prime importance. We studied different modified pulse shapes for application in DBS with respect to their efficiency to initiate neuronal activity. Numerical simulations of two mathematical neuron models were performed to investigate the effectiveness of different modified pulse shapes. According to our results, the pulse shapes considered showed a considerably increased efficiency in terms of both activation and entrainment of neural activity. We found that the introduction of a gap with a specific and optimized duration in a biphasic pulse and the reversal of the standard pulse phase order yielded stimulation protocols that could increase the efficiency and therefore reduce the energy consumption of stimulation. The improvements were achieved by simple modifications of existing stimulation techniques. The modification of the pulse shapes resulted in an improvement of up to 50% for both the activation of resting neurons and the entrainment of bursting neurons.
神经元结构的电刺激被用作许多神经系统疾病的一种治疗方法，例如，通过深部脑刺激（DBS）来治疗帕金森病。为了减少副作用、避免组织或电极损伤以及延长电池寿命，有效而温和的电刺激至关重要。我们研究了不同的改良脉冲形状在DBS中的应用，考察它们引发神经元活动的效率。对两个数学神经元模型进行了数值模拟，以研究不同改良脉冲形状的有效性。根据我们的结果，所考虑的脉冲形状在激活和诱导神经活动方面显示出显著提高的效率。我们发现，在双相脉冲中引入具有特定且优化持续时间的间隙以及反转标准脉冲相位顺序，产生的刺激方案可以提高效率，从而降低刺激的能量消耗。这些改进通过对现有刺激技术的简单修改得以实现。脉冲形状的修改使静息神经元的激活和爆发神经元的诱导效率提高了多达50%。
