Primary experimental study on safety of deep brain stimulation in RF electromagnetic field

With the rapid growth of clinical application of deep brain stimulation, its safety and functional concern in the electromagnetic field, another pollution becoming much more serious, has become more and more significant. Meanwhile, the measuring standards on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) for DBS are still incomplete. Particularly, the knowledge of the electromagnetic field induced signals on the implanted lead is ignorant while some informal reports some side effects. This paper briefly surmised the status of EMC standards on implantable medical devices. Based on the EMC experiments of DBS device we developed, two experiments for measuring the induced voltage of the deep brain stimulator in RF electromagnetic field were reported. The measured data showed that the induced voltage in some frequency was prominent, for example over 2 V. As a primary research, we think these results would be significant to cause researcher to pay more attention to the EMC safety problem and biological effects of the induced voltage in deep brain stimulation and other implantable devices.