NRV: An Open Framework for Evaluation of Peripheral Nerve Electrical Stimulation Strategies

Overview

Journal bioRxiv

Date 2024 Jan 31

PMID 38293181

Authors

Thomas Couppey

Louis Regnacq

Roland Giraud

Olivier Romain

Yannick Bornat

Florian Kolbl

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves has been used in various pathological contexts for rehabilitation purposes or to alleviate the symptoms of neuropathologies, thus improving the overall quality of life of patients. However, the development of novel therapeutic strategies is still a challenging issue requiring extensive experimental campaigns and technical development. To facilitate the design of new stimulation strategies, we provide a fully open source and self-contained software framework for the evaluation of peripheral nerve electrical stimulation. Our modeling approach, developed in the popular and well-established Python language, uses an object-oriented paradigm to map the physiological and electrical context. The framework is designed to facilitate multi-scale analysis, from single fiber stimulation to whole multifascicular nerves. It also allows the simulation of complex strategies such as multiple electrode combinations and waveforms ranging from conventional biphasic pulses to more complex modulated kHz stimuli. In addition, we provide automated support for stimulation strategy optimization and handle the computational backend transparently to the user. Our framework has been extensively tested and validated with several existing results in the literature.

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