Neural Probe
Neural probe fabricated on SU-8
Highly flexible, transparent memristor arrays wrapped around a pen
with a radius of curvature of 1.3 mm
SEM images of a silk fibron film micropatterned on a silicon wafer using UV photolithography
Biodegradation of the fabricated memristors
Introduction
Many exciting biomedical devices based on microtechnology have been introduced that provide solution to questions in biology, neuroscience, and medicine from engineer's perspective, such as silicon neural probes, massive MEA, and microfluidic chips. Among these devices, MEMS neural probes have shown promising results as next-generation neuroscience tool for small-animal experiments. Recently, few multi-functional silicon-based neural probes with extremely small dimensions have been presented. These probes not only allow one to monitor deep-brain neuronal activities of a mouse in real time but also allow one to deliver various stimulation modalities at the same time.
What is problem and why is it important?
One of the main applications of neural probes is chronic application where neural signals are monitored over a long period of time (> 4 weeks) while simultaneously observing the behaviors of small animals. However, currently presented neural probes are often limited in their uses to acute in vivo experiments (< 1 day) due to accumulated insulation resulting from immune responses over time. To investigate the fundamental mechanisms underlying common brain disorders and to link the relationship between animal behaviors to various stimulation, the currently available neural probe systems still require improvements in terms of long-term usability and overall system size.
Our approach
To address this problem, we aim to develop a neural probe system in a flexible platform with a chemical modification on the microelectrodes.