Premium
BIOPHYSICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN ELECTRICAL STIMULATION OF THE AUDITORY NERVOUS SYSTEM a
Author(s) -
Loeb Gerald E.,
White Mark W.,
Jenkins William M.
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1983.tb31625.x
Subject(s) - library science , medicine , gerontology , computer science
A considerable body of both theoretical and experimental data exists regarding the electrical activation of nervous tissue. Over the past decade, the increasing use of this technique as both a quantitative research tool and a prosthetic approach to restoration of function has spurred attempts to develop general descriptions of the relevant physical processes so that models and experimental results pertaining to widely different circumstances could be compared. The emerging picture has generally been that of an orderly, wellbehaved system in good agreement with the properties of the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the excitable nerve membrane.l However, a rather large number of variables must be accurately specified to obtain useful predictions from such models, and the relevant data are frequently either unavailable or impractical to obtain for the complicated circumstances pertaining to many clinical devices. Therefore, it is important to develop an efficient set of empirical descriptors of each system which can be used to relate clinical and animal experiments to each other and to the operating curves of such models. It is not our purpose to present a detailed model of the electrical activation of the auditory nerve. Too little is known about the electrical and physical properties of this system and too many technical variations of prosthetic electrodes and waveforms have been employed for this to be either feasible or useful (see the review by Eddington *). Rather, we here point out at least the general effects of the relevant factors and suggest some simplifying assumptions and insights that appear to account for most clinical results and that might guide future development. There appears to be a general consensus that the scala tympani affords the best-distributed access to the auditory nerve. Therefore, we have limited the ranges of many variables to those found in this setting to try to draw as many hard conclusions as possible, at the expense of generalizability to other situations. There are four general considerations in the electrical activation of neural tissue. First, the electrically excitable target elements must be defined and