Fabrication and verification of multi-angle intrafascicular neural interfaces(MINIs) for peripheral neural signal acquisition

Abstract

We propose a multi-angle intrafascicular neural interfaces (MINIs) based on parylene C polymer with multi-channel electrodes. The MINIs can be minimized to stress on the sciatic nerve because it can be highly flexible in a situation where the nerve is stretched in the direction of its length. The MINIs are designed in the form of 4 shanks each having 8 electrodes, which are spaced at regular intervals and inserted by multi-angles along the length of the sciatic nerve. After the insertion of the MINIs, we successfully obtained sensory neural signals from various channels according to physical stimulation of the hind paw of the rat and rabbit each. In addition, motor neural signals were acquired using each channels of MINIs. In the future plan, recording experiments for a long time will be conducted using this MINIs for neural signal tracking.