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Section: New Results

Selectivity of implanted neural electrical stimulation

Participants : Lucie William, David Guiraud, Charles Fattal, Christine Azevedo, Arthur Hiairrassary.

In the context of using a multi-contact cuff electrode positioned around a trunk nerve to activate selectively the fascicles leading to selective movements, a pre-clinical study was performed on the sciatic nerve of four rabbits (Lab. Chirurgie Experimentale, Institut de Biologie, University of Montpellier). The purpose was to compare and classify six different currents configuration (current ratios) (Fig.8) with a 12- contact cuff electrode using selectivity, robustness (i.e. ability to maintain selectivity within a range of current amplitudes) and efficiency (i.e. electrical consumption of the considered multipolar configuration versus the electrical consumption of the reference whole-ring configuration) indexes.

Figure 8. Six different configurations of the 12-contact electrode were tested: Ring, Tripolar Transverse Ring (TTR), Tripolar Transverse (TT), Tripolar Longitudinal Ring (TLR), Tripolar Longitudinal (TL), Steering Current Ring (SCR)
IMG/electrodes.png

Results indicated that the optimal configuration depends on the weights applied to selectivity robustness and efficiency criteria. Tripolar transverse is the most robust configuration and the less efficient, whereas tripolar longitudinal ring is efficient but not robust. New configurations issued from a previous theoretical study we carried out such as steering current ring appears as good compromise between the 3 criteria [18].

The PhD of Lucie William (started in October 2019) will be the continuation of this work in the context of neural electrical stimulation of complete quadriplegic human participants (AGILIS project).