CAREER: Peripheral nerve recording, analysis, and modulation for neural communication and control

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

Electroceuticals is a new research area in bioelectronics and neurotechnologies that can potentially benefit more than 10 million American patients. It aims to create implants that can monitor and modulate nerve activity to treat gastrointestinal diseases, diabetes, epilepsy, asthma, arthritis, chronic pain, and hypertension and other heart conditions. Two significant engineering challenges to implement electroceuticals are (1) to sense and analyze nerve neural signals, and (2) to define and incorporate neural feedback to improve stimulation outcomes. This project aims to develop a novel integrated hardware and software platform to overcome these two challenges. Thus a future electroceutical therapy can be implemented and optimized based on neural feedback and physiological responses. This project also includes an integrated educational and outreach component to both foster interdisciplinary research training and to increase participation of underrepresented students in STEM disciplines. This project will establish a new low-noise recording capability with a stimulation function to interface with nerves. It will also generate valuable nerve datasets that will be critical for the development of deep learning algorithms to analyze neural signals and support adaptive neuromodulation. The new technical contributions from the hardware aspects will include a new peripheral nerve recorder with multiple noise reduction techniques to enable nerve recording, and a new redundant crossfire stimulator to minimize stimulation noise artifacts for simultaneous recording and stimulation. From the software aspect, this research proposes a deep neural network based flow to de-noise the recordings, detect neural signals, and decode information. This project will also perform novel in-vivo experiments to validate the proposed technology platform and to simulate a real application in treating heart failure as a proof-of-concept demonstration of electroceuticals. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.