Detection of Sensory Events from Acute Spinal Cord Recordings

We used acute multi-channel extracellular recording techniques to extract neural activity associated with external sensory events from the spinal cords of rats. Five classes of sensory events were recorded - electrical stimulation of the nerves in each of four digits from one forepaw and periods during which no stimulation occurred (idle periods). A simple feature extraction and classification scheme was devised to classify external sensory events during single trials. The five classes of sensory events were correctly identified at a mean accuracy of over 93%. Thus, we have shown the feasibility to detect and classify peripheral sensory information from multichannel recordings of the spinal cord. This would be useful following spinal cord injury, for example, in a closed-loop neural prosthetic for partial restoration of motor function through functional electrical stimulation