Study on electrical stimulation in the deep brain in rat BMI model

Abstract

An automated system that locomotion of a rat triggered stimuli in the deep brain has been developed to improve experimental efficiency in Brain-Machine Interface experiments. A pair of stimulation electrodes were placed in the lateral hypothalamus of the rat brain. The locomotion was optically detected by tracking LEDs attached on the skull of a freely behaving rat. The rat initially had a sham period of 15 minutes, followed by an active period of 15 minutes where biphasic spike trains were applied to the deep brain. Experiments were conducted for 2 or 3 sets of the above trials on 4 adult rats. Rats tended to walk voluntarily in the active periods, while one rat learned to obtain the stimuli by shaking its head instead of walking. The behavioral change rapidly ceased in the sham periods, which suggests that our method temporarily induced the locomotion without altering natural behaviors of the rat.