Neural engineering--a new discipline for analyzing and interacting with the nervous system

The field of neural engineering focuses on an area of research at the interface between neuroscience and engineering. The area of neural engineering was first associated with the brain machine interface but is much broader and encompasses experimental, computational, and theoretical aspects of neural interfacing, neuroelectronics, neuromechanical systems, neuroinformatics, neuroimaging, neural prostheses, artificial and biological neural circuits, neural control, neural tissue regeneration, neural signal processing, neural modelling and neuro-computation. One of the goals of neural engineering is to develop a selective interface for the peripheral nervous system.

Nerve cuffs electrodes have been developed to either reshape or maintain the nerve into an elongated shape in order to increase the circumference to cross sectional ratio. It is then possible to place many electrodes around the nerve to achieve selectivity. This new cuff (flat interface nerve electrode: FINE) was applied to the hypoglossal nerve and the sciatic nerve in dogs and cats to estimate the selectivity of the interface.

By placing many contacts close to the axons, three different types of selectivity were achieved: 1) The FINE could generate a high degree of stimulation selectivity as estimated by the individual fascicle recording. 2) Similarly, recording selectivity was also demonstrated and blind source algorithms were applied to recover the signals. 3) Finally, by placing arrays of electrodes along the nerve, small fiber diameters could be excited before large fibers thereby reversing the recruitment order.

Taking advantage of the fact that nerves are not round but oblong or flat allows a novel design for selective nerve interface with the peripheral nervous system. This new design has found applications in many disorders of the nervous system such as bladder incontinence, obstructive sleep apnea and stroke.