Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA.
Nat Commun. 2012 Jun 26;3:921. doi: 10.1038/ncomms1914.
Electrical stimulation is currently used to treat a wide range of cardiovascular, sensory and neurological diseases. Despite its success, there are significant limitations to its application, including incompatibility with magnetic resonance imaging, limited control of electric fields and decreased performance associated with tissue inflammation. Magnetic stimulation overcomes these limitations but existing devices (that is, transcranial magnetic stimulation) are large, reducing their translation to chronic applications. In addition, existing devices are not effective for deeper, sub-cortical targets. Here we demonstrate that sub-millimeter coils can activate neuronal tissue. Interestingly, the results of both modelling and physiological experiments suggest that different spatial orientations of the coils relative to the neuronal tissue can be used to generate specific neural responses. These results raise the possibility that micro-magnetic stimulation coils, small enough to be implanted within the brain parenchyma, may prove to be an effective alternative to existing stimulation devices.
电刺激目前被用于治疗广泛的心血管、感觉和神经疾病。尽管它取得了成功，但在应用方面仍存在重大限制，包括与磁共振成像不兼容、电场控制有限以及与组织炎症相关的性能下降。磁刺激克服了这些限制，但现有的设备（即经颅磁刺激）体积较大，限制了其在慢性应用中的转化。此外，现有的设备对更深层的皮质下目标效果不佳。在这里，我们证明了亚毫米线圈可以激活神经元组织。有趣的是，模型和生理实验的结果表明，线圈相对于神经元组织的不同空间取向可用于产生特定的神经反应。这些结果提出了一种可能性，即小到足以植入脑实质内的微磁刺激线圈，可能成为现有刺激设备的有效替代方案。
