Nanotubes on the Brain

Neural implants could benefit from coated electrodes.

Metal electrodes are increasingly being used in brain implants that help treat depression and the tremors of Parkinson's disease, and in ever more sophisticated prosthetic devices. In spite of these successes, conventional metal electrodes have major limitations: performance deteriorates over time, and it's difficult to design electrodes that are efficient at both sending and receiving electrical signals. Now researchers at the University of Texas are developing electrodes that are more efficient at both sending and receiving electrical stimuli. These electrodes, which are coated with carbon nanotubes, could lead to neural implants that monitor how they affect the neurons that they stimulate, conserving battery life and reducing side effects.

Neural nanotubes: In these scanning electron microscope images, electrodes coated with carbon nanotubes, like the one on the right, are more conductive and better at interfacing with nervous tissue. The electrode on the left is bare. Credit: Edward Keefer

Researchers led by Edward Keefer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center developed a simple method for coating electrodes with carbon nanotubes. The coated electrodes were better at recording neural activity than were bare electrodes when implanted in mice and in a monkey. Importantly, the coated electrodes provided less-noisy recordings than bare ones did. They also required less power to operate.

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And the nanotubes enhanced the electrodes' ability to both record and stimulate neural activity more than any other coating previously reported. Today's neural prosthetics are good at sending electrical signals but not at receiving them, says Ravi Bellamkonda, director of the Neurological Biomaterials and Therapeutics group at Georgia Tech. Thus, the batteries in deep-brain stimulators--implanted devices used to treat Parkinson's--last only three years because the devices are constantly on. "You want to see if the neuron is quiet," says Bellamkonda. A feedback-enabled device that powered off when not needed could potentially use the same battery for a few more years.

The University of Texas researchers' technique for modifying electrodes is simple. Electrodes are placed in a water-based solution of carbon nanotubes; when a small voltage is applied to sites on the electrodes, carbon nanotubes localize there and can be fixed. Joseph Pancrazio, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, says that Keefer's electrode modification "is something that can be done readily." This means that other labs experimenting with neural prosthetics are likely to adopt the technique. By contrast, Pancrazio says, other methods for interfacing carbon nanotubes with neurons have required the use of special substrates and must be done at very high temperatures.