Magnetically induced deep brain stimulation of neuronal firing for pain relief

Pain, either acute pain or chronic pain, is usually treated/relieved by chemical means, in which nociceptive signals are blocked from transmitting into the pain registration sites in the brain. However, besides their side effects, chemical means of pain relief are not always effective, causing some serious clinical incidents like anesthesia awareness and chronic pains that are not treatable. A physical means of pain relief that physically modifies pain perception at the brain sites responsible for pain registration could be more effective, for both acute pain and chronic pain. In this paper a novel approach of magnetically induced deep brain modulation of neuronal firing is proposed for pain treatment/relief, in which pain treatment/relief is bioelectronics based and is non-invasive and free of side effects. A novel pulse magnetic field projector has been developed for pain relief through modulation of neuronal firing at the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). It is based on the neuroscience findings that pain registration in the brain is closely related to the excitation of nociceptive neurons at the ACC, in which the nociceptive neuronal firing rate increases as pain gets more intense. The mechanism of pain relief in the proposed approach is to modify the nociceptive neuronal firing rate at the ACC by magnetically inducing a pulse electric field applying on the neurons in the ACC, hyperpolarizing the neurons that are firing at high frequency during pain perception, resulting in a low level firing rate associated to no pain. A parametric study has been carried out to determine the physical and technical parameters of the proposed approach. The feasibility of the approach has been verified by simulation with the modulation implemented on a reconstructed ACC LV pyramidal cell using Hodgkin-Huxley style model. Action potentials recorded in the soma indicated that the firing frequency can be modulated by the applied pulse electric field.