Does a coupling capacitor enhance the charge balance during neural stimulation? An empirical study.

Due to their DC-blocking characteristic, coupling capacitors are widely used to prevent potentially harmful charge buildup at the electrode-tissue interface. Although the capacitors can be an effective safety measure, it often seems overlooked that coupling capacitors actually introduce an offset voltage over the electrode-tissue interface as well. This work investigates this offset voltage both analytically and experimentally.

High frequency switched-mode stimulation can evoke post synaptic responses in cerebellar principal neurons.

This paper investigates the efficacy of high frequency switched-mode neural stimulation. Instead of using a constant stimulation amplitude, the stimulus is switched on and off repeatedly with a high frequency (up to 100 kHz) duty cycled signal. By means of tissue modeling that includes the dynamic properties of both the tissue material as well as the axon membrane, it is first shown that switched-mode stimulation depolarizes the cell membrane in a similar way as classical constant amplitude stimulation.

Cerebellar output controls generalized spike-and-wave discharge occurrence.

Objective: Disrupting thalamocortical activity patterns has proven to be a promising approach to stop generalized spike-and-wave discharges (GSWDs) characteristic of absence seizures. Here, we investigated to what extent modulation of neuronal firing in cerebellar nuclei (CN), which are anatomically in an advantageous position to disrupt cortical oscillations through their innervation of a wide variety of thalamic nuclei, is effective in controlling absence seizures.

Methods: Two unrelated mouse models of generalized absence seizures were used: the natural mutant tottering, which is characterized by a missense mutation in Cacna1a, and inbred C3H/HeOuJ.

A Power-Efficient Multichannel Neural Stimulator Using High-Frequency Pulsed Excitation From an Unfiltered Dynamic Supply.

This paper presents a neural stimulator system that employs a fundamentally different way of stimulating neural tissue compared to classical constant current stimulation. A stimulation pulse is composed of a sequence of current pulses injected at a frequency of 1 MHz for which the duty cycle is used to control the stimulation intensity. The system features 8 independent channels that connect to any of the 16 electrodes at the output.