Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Miami, 1251 Memorial Dr, MEA 203, Coral Gables, FL 33146, United States of America.
J Neural Eng. 2020 Jan 14;17(1):016031. doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/ab4104.
Spinal cord injury remains an ailment with no comprehensive cure, and affected patients suffer from a greatly diminished quality of life. This large population could significantly benefit from prosthetic technologies to replace missing limbs, reanimate nonfunctional limbs, and enable new modes of technologies to restore muscle control and function. While cortically driven brain machine interfaces have achieved great success in interfacing with an external device to restore lost functions, interfacing with the spinal cord can provide an additional site to record motor control signals, which can have its own advantages, despite challenges from using a smaller non-human primate (NHP) model. The goal of this study is to develop such a spinal cord neural interface to record motor signals from the high cervical levels of the spinal cord in a common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) model. Approach and main results. Detailed methods are discussed for this smaller NHP model that includes behavioral training, surgical methods for electrode placement, connector placement and wire handling, electrode specifications and modifications for accessing high cervical level interneurons and motorneurons. The study also discusses the methods and challenges involved in behavioral multi-channel extracellular recording from the marmoset spinal cord, including the major recording failure mechanisms encountered during the study.
Marmosets provide a good step between rodent and larger NHP models due to their small size, ease of handling, cognitive abilities, and similarities to other primate motor systems. The study shows the feasibility of recording spinal cord signals and using marmosets as a smaller NHP model in behavioral neuroscience studies. Interfacing with the spinal cord in chronically implanted animals can provide useful information about how motor control signals within the spinal cord are transformed to cause limb movements.
脊髓损伤仍然是一种无法全面治愈的疾病，受影响的患者生活质量大大降低。这一大群人可以从假肢技术中受益，这些技术可以替代缺失的肢体，使非功能肢体重新活跃，并使新技术模式能够恢复肌肉控制和功能。虽然皮质驱动的脑机接口在与外部设备接口以恢复丧失的功能方面取得了巨大成功，但与脊髓接口可以提供另一个记录运动控制信号的部位，尽管使用较小的非人类灵长类动物（NHP）模型存在挑战，但它有自己的优势。本研究的目的是开发这样一种脊髓神经接口，以记录普通狨猴（Callithrix jacchus）模型高颈段脊髓的运动信号。方法和主要结果。详细讨论了针对这种较小的 NHP 模型的方法，包括行为训练、用于放置电极的手术方法、连接器放置和电线处理、用于访问高颈段中间神经元和运动神经元的电极规格和修改。该研究还讨论了从狨猴脊髓进行行为多通道细胞外记录的方法和挑战，包括在研究过程中遇到的主要记录失败机制。意义：由于狨猴体型小、易于处理、认知能力强，并且与其他灵长类动物运动系统相似，因此它们是啮齿动物和较大 NHP 模型之间的良好步骤。该研究表明，记录脊髓信号并使用狨猴作为较小的 NHP 模型进行行为神经科学研究是可行的。在慢性植入动物中与脊髓接口可以提供有关脊髓内运动控制信号如何转换以引起肢体运动的有用信息。
