Conducting polymer wires for intravascular neural recording

Abstract

Brain-machine interfaces are a technology with the potential to fundamentally change the way people interact with their environment, but their adoption has been hampered by the invasiveness of conventional implanted cortical microelectrode arrays. Llinás et al. have proposed a novel design for intravascular nanowire electrode arrays, which promise to be less invasive than current technology. Early work utilizing platinum nanowires showed that metal wires are too stiff for this application. Conducting polymer nanowires could be used in place of metal to build electrodes with far lower stiffness and high conductivity. This thesis describes several all-polymer electrode architectures and the fabrication techniques used to build them. Polypyrrole microwire electrodes were first built in order to demonstrate the feasibility of an all-polymer neural recording electrode, and were shown to give high-fidelity intravascular recordings. Polyaniline nanowires were then fabricated by coaxial electrospinning, which was shown to be a viable technique for the manufacture of such wires. These wires will be integrated to form complete nanowire electrodes and tested in animals before moving towards human applications.