Neuroscience

Electrode

Electrophysiology

Cortex (anatomy)

Visual cortex

Biology

Microelectrode

Biomedical engineering

Physical chemistry

Composite material

Chemistry

Materials science

Neuroprosthetics

Stimulation

Expansive

Multielectrode array

Compressive strength

Medicine

Electrode array

Journal of Neural Engineering

Electrical stimulation via microelectrodes implanted in cortex has been suggested as a potential treatment for a wide range of neurological disorders. Despite some success however, the effectiveness of conventional electrodes remains limited, in part due to an inability to create specific patterns of neural activity around each electrode and in part due to challenges with maintaining a stable interface. The use of implantable micro-coils to magnetically stimulate the cortex has the potential to overcome these limitations because the asymmetric fields from coils can be harnessed to selectively activate some neurons, e.g. vertically-oriented pyramidal neurons while avoiding others, e.g. horizontally-oriented passing axons. In vitro experiments have shown that activation is indeed confined with micro-coils but their effectiveness in the intact brain of living animals has not been evaluated.

Spatially confined responses of mouse visual cortex to intracortical magnetic stimulation from micro-coils