DBS Series — rDBSA Research Arrays

What a research array asks that a clinical lead does not

A clinical DBS lead is built to deliver therapy, so its contacts are large and few — enough to move the symptom, not enough to say where the effect came from. The rDBSA asks the second question. It places more and smaller contacts along the same trajectory, each addressable channel by channel, and each able to stimulate, record, or both within one session.

Separating stimulus from response

Putting a known distance between the stimulating contact and the recording contact is the experimental point: it lets you ask what the tissue did at a measured offset from where the current went in. Two consequences follow for protocol design:

• Stimulation artifact sets the usable window. Plan the recovery interval before the protocol, not after the first session.
• Contact selection is a variable, not a setting. Record the exact contacts used in every trial — the spatial claim depends on it.

Closed-loop work uses the same property: recording contacts supply the trigger, stimulating contacts deliver the response, both on one implanted array.

Long trajectories, and what they cost

Subthalamic nucleus and globus pallidus work in large-brain models needs penetration depths a cortical probe does not offer; catalog designs run to tens of millimetres (STN at 45 mm, GP at 35 and 60 mm).

• Trajectory error accumulates with depth. A one-degree angular error is small at 5 mm and material at 45 mm. Plan the approach with imaging and verify the track histologically.
• Insertion speed matters more, not less. A long shank displaces tissue along its whole path.

Small-animal configuration

A rat-sized rDBSA keeps the contact arrangement and scales the geometry to rat anatomy, so a protocol developed in rodents transfers to a larger model without changing the recording approach.

Specifications

Silicon, 15 µm, up to 32 addressable contacts. STN and GP configurations.

Research use only.