Dadarlat Maria C, Sun Yujiao, Stryker Michael P
Physiology Department at the University of California - San Francisco, 675 Nelson Rising Lane, Room 436 San Francisco, CA 94158.
Int IEEE EMBS Conf Neural Eng. 2019 Mar;2019:1113-1117. doi: 10.1109/NER.2019.8716956. Epub 2019 May 20.
Electrical stimulation is a highly-effective, temporally-precise technique to evoke neural activity in the brain, and thus is critically important for both research and clinical applications. Here, we set out to understand the time-course and spatial spread of neural activation elicited by electrical stimulation. By imaging the cortex of awake, chronically-implanted, transgenic mice during electrical stimulation, we found that a broad range of stimulation parameters led to widespread neural activation. In general, increasing current amplitude and the number of stimulation pulses progressively produced higher maximum activity and activated larger areas of cortex. However, increasing stimulation frequency above 30 Hz primarily shifted the timing, not amplitude, of peak activity. Our results demonstrate that even weak electrical stimulation widely activates neurons within awake mouse cortex.
电刺激是一种高效、时间精确的诱发大脑神经活动的技术，因此对研究和临床应用都至关重要。在此，我们着手了解电刺激引发的神经激活的时间进程和空间扩散。通过在电刺激期间对清醒、长期植入的转基因小鼠的皮层进行成像，我们发现广泛的刺激参数会导致广泛的神经激活。一般来说，增加电流幅度和刺激脉冲数量会逐渐产生更高的最大活性，并激活更大面积的皮层。然而，将刺激频率提高到30Hz以上主要会改变峰值活动的时间，而不是幅度。我们的结果表明，即使是微弱的电刺激也能广泛激活清醒小鼠皮层内的神经元。
