Biomechanical characterization of needle piercing into peripheral nervous tissue

Several neural interfaces have been developed to control neuroprostheses and hybrid bionic systems. Among them, intraneural electrodes are very promising because they represent an interesting trade-off between the needs for high selectivity and for reduced invasiveness. However, in most of the cases, no particular attention has been devoted so far to the design of these systems starting from the mechanical properties of the system to be interfaced. The aim of this paper was to study and characterize in a quantitative way the piercing of peripheral nervous tissue in order to gather useful information to design intraneural interfaces able to reduce (as much as possible) the damages provoked by this task. In particular, attention has been paid to determine the values of force and pressure to carry out the piercing task in different velocity conditions. From the experimental data it was possible to characterize indirectly the tissue sinking under the needle tip. For each experimental velocity (ranging from 1 to 2000 mm/min) a threshold, under which the tissue cannot be pierced, has been calculated. The force magnitude required for piercing was shown to be in the range 0.3-25 mN for the different velocities. Moreover, differences between piercing carried out at very low velocity (multi-piercing) and at low velocity (mono-piercing) have been characterized and correlated with the physical characteristics of the nervous tissue. Experimental data have been integrated with a theoretical analysis of the neural interfaces piercing structures. The problem of buckling, representing for these structures the main cause of tissue piercing impossibility, has been analyzed. The nonlinear theoretical model allows to compare different needle geometries and materials with regard to piercing possibility at different velocities. Moreover, an optimization of piercing elements geometry with regard to amount of used material and space has been provided.