Recording experience with the thin-film Longitudinal Intra-Fascicular Electrode, a multichannel peripheral nerve interface

This paper presents our experience evaluating a multi-channel peripheral nerve interface, the thin-film longitudinal intra-fascicular electrode (tfLIFE). One application for the tfLIFE is their potential use as a means to detect independent channels of volitional commands from the amputee. The neural interface would be required to be sufficiently selective to detect the activity of single motor nerve fibres within the nerve stump. Experiments were conducted in the acute rabbit model evaluate the recording characteristics of the tfLIFE array. Multiunit activity was recorded in response to mechanical stimulation of peripheral mechanoreceptors. In some channels in all experiments, large single unit spikes were clearly visible. These data were then processed to determine whether an artificial discriminator could be trained to detect and track activity from the multi unit recordings. We also tested whether inclusion of multi channel information could be used to improve the performance of the discriminator. Our preliminary results indicate the inclusion of multiple channels significantly improves the performance.