An Experimental Study on the Insertion of Neural Interfaces into Peripheral Nerve Using a Piezoelectric Vibrator

Abstract

This paper introduces a preliminary experimental study on the feasibility of vibration-assisted method to puncture the peripheral nerve with neural-interfaces. When performing the surgical operation to intrafascicularly implant neural interfaces to the peripheral nerve, one of difficult points is to puncture the tough epineurium (i.e. the outermost membrane of the nerve) with fine-shanks of the neural interface. In the case that the needle-tip of the shank is forcibly inserted into the nerve with large external force, this process sometimes causes damages not only mechanically to the shanks but also neurologically to the nerve. In this study, with the aim of investigating the effective method to insert the needle-tip into the nerve, we attempt to utilize mechanical vibration under the hypothesis that the vibration-assisted method would be helpful to reduce the mechanical damage to the shank and neurological damage to the nerve. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the method, we firstly design the vibration module that can generate linear vibrating motion with a stack-type piezoelectric actuator and a compliant mechanism, and then perform the in-vitro experiments with animal subjects. In the experimental test, even though the effect of the proposed method is not clearly verified, we can observe the potential applicability of the vibration-assisted needle-tip insertion method. With consideration for the lessons from this study, we will focus on maximize the effectiveness of the proposed method in the future works.