Noninvasive Detection of Deep Brain Stimulation Current Field Distribution of Coma Arousal based on Acoustoelectric...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a well-established neural regulation therapy whose clinical efficacy is highly dependent on the DBS current field distribution. There remains an urgent need of directly detecting DBS current field to guide the lead direction and the subsequent regulation. As an emerging neuroimaging method, acoustoelectric brain imaging (AEBI) can directly map current density distribution which provides a promising approach for noninvasively detecting DBS current field. To further promote AEBI into a specific DBS therapy, this study applies acoustoelectric signals to detect DBS current field distribution towards coma arousal targets. With a DBS current applied to the coma arousal target, the AEBI experiment is implemented on a living rat brain to detect the DBS current field. The results show that the DBS current field can be mapped by acoustoelectric (AE) signals with ~1.5 mm spatial resolution. The instant AEBI images, during one period of 7.69 ms, can describe the dynamic activation pattern of the DBS stimulus current. Besides, the DBS current field mapped by SNR values of decoded AE signals at DBS frequency closely matches the AEBI image(r=0.85). This study confirms the ability of AE signals to noninvasively detect DBS current field distribution of coma arousal target. AEBI is expected to develop into a noninvasive DBS current real-time monitoring technique.