Long-Term Non Anesthetic Preclinical Study Available Extra-Cranial Brain Activator (ECBA) System for the Future Minimally Invasive Human Neuro Modulation.

In recent years, electroceuticals have been spotlighted as an emerging treatment for various severe chronic brain diseases, owing to their intrinsic advantage of electrical interaction with the brain, which is the most electrically active organ. However, the majority of research has verified only the short-term efficacy through acute studies in laboratory tests owing to the lack of a reliable miniaturized platform for long-term animal studies. The construction of a sufficient integrated system for such a platform is extremely difficult because it requires multi-disciplinary work using state-of-the-art technologies in a wide range of fields. In this study, we propose a complete system of an implantable platform for long-term preclinical brain studies. Our proposed system, the extra-cranial brain activator (ECBA), consists of a titanium-packaged implantable module and a helmet-type base station that powers the module wirelessly. The ECBA can also be controlled by a remote handheld device. Using the ECBA, we performed a long-term non-anesthetic study with multiple canine subjects, and the resulting PET-CT scans demonstrated remarkable enhancement in brain activity relating to memory and sensory skills. Furthermore, the histological analysis and high-temperature aging test confirmed the reliability of the system for up to 31 months. Hence, the proposed ECBA system is expected to lead a new paradigm of human neuromodulation studies in the near future.

Long-term Non-Anesthetic Preclinical Study Available Extra-Cranial Brain Activator (ECBA) System for the Future Minimally-Invasive Human Neuro-Modulation.

Long-term preclinical study available extracranial brain activator (ECBA) system, ECBAv2, is proposed for the non-anesthetic canine models. The titanium-packaged module shows enhanced durability, even after a year of implantation in the scalp. In addition, the wearable helmet type base station provides a stable experimental environment without anesthesia. In this work, HFS stimulation is induced to six canine models for 30 minutes every day over 4 weeks (10Hz, 40Hz and no stimulation for each pair of subjects). Pre- and post-HFS stimulation PET-CT image shows remarkable increases of glucose metabolism in the temporal and parietal lobes. Moreover, both the 40-Hz and 10-Hz groups shows noticeable increase and the former group has more increments than the latter. Our results establish that HFS stimulation definitely worked as facilitating brain activity which may affect memory and sensory skills, respectively.