skip to main content


This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2024

Title: Multichannel Electrophysiological Recording With Spike Detection and Sorting in a Duty-Cycled Wireless Optogenetic Headstage
Neural signal recording and optical stimulation using implantable devices have become a ubiquitous method to treat brain disorders, yet there lie some shortcomings, such as size, weight, and functionalities of the implants. This work presents a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) component-based miniaturized wireless optogenetic headstage with simultaneous optical stimulation and electrophysiological recording for freely moving rats. The system includes a battery-based neural stimulator consisting of a low-dropout (LDO) regulator, an oscillator, and a μ LED. The electrophysiological signal recording system includes an intracortical neural probe implemented on a shape memory polymer (SMP) substrate, an array of neural amplifiers with an integrated analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a transceiver IC, and a ceramic antenna. A digital sub-1-GHz transceiver integrated with a low-power microcontroller (MCU) is used to transmit the acquired neural data to a remote receiver unit, followed by offline spike detection and sorting in LabVIEW. The front-end recording amplifiers provide a gain of 45.7 dB with the input-referred noise of 2.4μVrms . The integrated multiplexer (MUX) with the ADC allows sampling of the amplified voltage at a configurable sampling rate of 160–480 kSamples/s. The total power consumption of the stimulation and the recording system is 23 mW. The dimension of the headstage device is 13.5×21.3 mm, weighing 4 g without the battery. The system is experimentally validated in an in vivo setting by placing the headstage on the head of a male rat and recording the neural signals from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brain. This integrative neural signal recording and spike sorting approach would be useful for the development of a closed-loop neuromodulation system.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2309413
NSF-PAR ID:
10488877
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Sensors Journal
Volume:
23
Issue:
21
ISSN:
1530-437X
Page Range / eLocation ID:
26075 to 26086
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. This paper demonstrates a commercial off-the-shelf components (COTS)-based miniaturized wireless optogenetic headstage with simultaneous optical stimulation and electro-physiological recording capability for freely moving rodents. The proposed headstage contains 32 recording channels. The optical stimulation system is a battery-powered neural stimulator, comprised of a low dropout regulator (LDO), an oscillator, and a µLED. The electrophysiological signal recording system includes an intracortical neural probe made of a GaN-on-silicon substrate, an array of neural amplifiers with an integrated analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a transceiver integrated circuit, and a ceramic antenna. The integrated MUX with the ADC allows sampling of the amplified voltage at a sampling rate of 4000 kSamples/s. By placing the headstage on the head of a rodent and recording the neural signals from the Ventral Tegmental area of the brain, the system is experimentally validated in in-vivo. Experimental result shows that the proposed headstage can trigger neuron activity while collecting and detecting single-cell microvolt amplitude activity from multiple channels. 
    more » « less
  2. This paper presents a power-efficient complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) neural signal-recording read-out circuit for multichannel neuromodulation implants. The system includes a neural amplifier and a successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (SAR-ADC) for recording and digitizing neural signal data to transmit to a remote receiver. The synthetic neural signal is generated using a LabVIEW myDAQ device and processed through a LabVIEW GUI. The read-out circuit is designed and fabricated in the standard 0.5 μμm CMOS process. The proposed amplifier uses a fully differential two-stage topology with a reconfigurable capacitive-resistive feedback network. The amplifier achieves 49.26 dB and 60.53 dB gain within the frequency bandwidth of 0.57–301 Hz and 0.27–12.9 kHz to record the local field potentials (LFPs) and the action potentials (APs), respectively. The amplifier maintains a noise–power tradeoff by reducing the noise efficiency factor (NEF) to 2.53. The capacitors are manually laid out using the common-centroid placement technique, which increases the linearity of the ADC. The SAR-ADC achieves a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 45.8 dB, with a resolution of 8 bits. The ADC exhibits an effective number of bits of 7.32 at a low sampling rate of 10 ksamples/s. The total power consumption of the chip is 26.02 μμW, which makes it highly suitable for a multi-channel neural signal recording system. 
    more » « less
  3. This work presents a miniaturized wireless power transfer (WPT) system integrated with a neuromodulation headstage for duty-cycled optical stimulation of freely moving rodents. The proposed WPT system is built using the commercially available off-the-shelf components (COTS) for the optogenetic neuromodulation system consisting of a bridge rectifier, a DC-DC converter, an oscillator circuit, an LED driver, and a μLED. The total power consumption of the stimulation system is 14 mW which is provided using the WPT method. The WPT system includes a novel transmitter (TX) coil implemented on a printed circuit board (PCB), and a solenoid receiver (RX) coil wrapped around a customized 3-D printed headstage. The proposed TX coil is designed in such a way that the magnetic field all across the TX coil is sufficient to provide the required power to the optical stimulation system that is worn as a headstage by the freely moving rat. The headstage device's dimension is 18.75 mm × 21.95 mm, weighing 4.75 g. The ratio of the weight of the headstage and rat is 4.75:300. The proposed system is able to achieve a maximum overall efficiency of ∼63% at 5 cm separation between the TX and RX coils, where the maximum power transfer efficiency (PTE) of the WPT system is ∼88% and the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the rectifier is 71.6%. The proposed system with reconfigurable stimulation frequency is suitable for exciting different brain areas for long-term health monitoring. 
    more » « less
  4. For the treatment of chronic neuropathic diseases, long-term behavior study of the patient is very important. The behavior study is performed using neural stimulation and simultaneously recording the response from the neural cells. Headstage-based neuromodulation device has become one of the popular methods for neural stimulation in recent times. In this work, a wirelessly powered system is presented that provides constant power to a headstage based optogenetic stimulator, which includes a receiver (RX) coil, a rectifier, and an mm-sized light-emitting-diode (LED). A multi-layered transmitter (TX) coil is designed to provide uniform power transmission over the 20.7 cm × 14 cm mouse behavioral cage area. A maximum of ~49% efficiency is achieved using the proposed system at 3 cm distance through the air media at 13.56 MHz operating frequency. The proposed system uses less number of headstage resonators on the 3-D printed light-weight headstage which is able to achieve higher efficiency compared to the other state-of-the-art. 
    more » « less
  5. This work presents a fully integrated neural interface system in a small form factor (1.9 g), consisting of a μLED silicon optoelectrode (12 μLEDs and 32 recording sites in a 4-shank configuration), an Intan 32-channel recording chip, and a custom optical stimulation chip for controlling 12 μLEDs. High-resolution optical stimulation with approximately 68.5 nW radiant flux resolution is achieved by a custom LED driver ASIC, which enables individual control of up to 48 channels with a current precision of 1 μA, a maximum current of 1.024 mA, and an update rate of > 10 kHz. Recording is performed by an off-the-shelf 32- channel digitizing front-end ASIC from Intan®. Two compact custom interface PCBs were designed to link the headstage with a PC. The prototype system demonstrates precise current generation, sufficient optical radiant flux generation (𝚽𝒆 > 𝟎. 𝟏𝟔 𝛍𝐖), and fast turn-on of μLEDs (𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒆 < 𝟏𝟎 𝛍𝐬). Single animal in vivo experiments validated the headstage’s capability to precisely modulate single neuronal activity and independently modulate activities of separate neuronal populations near neighboring optoelectrode shanks. 
    more » « less