Background
The spinal cord injury causes the limb movement dysfunction below the injured segment, which not only can bring physical and psychological injuries to the patient, but also can cause huge economic burden to families and the whole society. Therefore, the reconstruction of paralyzed limb motor functions has been an important topic in neuroscience research.
After injury to the adult central system, axons of upper neurons hardly grow to originally connected lower neurons to form new functional synaptic connections, which brings challenges to motor function reconstruction after spinal cord injury. Researchers in neurobiology have been treating spinal cord injuries by neurotrophic factors in combination with techniques such as gene induction, stem cell transplantation, spinal cord scaffolds, etc., but have not been successful to date in restoring the complex activation pattern and coordination of the leg muscles during walking.
With the continuous development of electronic technology, the application of functional electrical stimulation technology as a potential functional reconstruction method for spinal cord injury patients has received much attention. The functional electric stimulation is to stimulate muscles or nerves by pulse current of a certain sequence, thereby recovering the lost or damaged limb movement function and realizing the rehabilitation of paralyzed patients.
Research papers published by Courtine researchers at the federal institute of technology in zurich in 2016 and 2018, respectively, in Nature have demonstrated that it is feasible to restore motor function of lower limbs using electrical stimulation of spinal nerve function. The disadvantage is that as many as 147 stimulation modalities are mentioned as being required since the stimulation target is a motor neuron. While neuroprostheses can only be used with a limited number of electrodes. To reduce the chance of damage and errors during use, it is of course desirable to have a smaller number of electrodes as well.
Disclosure of Invention
The present invention is directed to a two-electrode electronic system for reconstructing gait movement function, so as to solve the problems mentioned in the background art.
In order to achieve the purpose, the invention provides the following technical scheme: a two-electrode electronic system for reconstructing gait motor functions, comprising:
-an instruction acquisition system: the pulse signal generating system is used for acquiring instruction information, generating a control instruction according to the instruction information and sending the control instruction to the pulse signal generating system;
-a pulse signal generating system: receiving a control instruction sent by an instruction acquisition system, generating pulse signals according to the control instruction, and alternately sending the pulse signals to two pairs of biostimulation electrodes, wherein the pulse signals are positive voltage pulse signal strings or negative voltage pulse signal strings, the pulse width of the pulse signals in the positive voltage pulse signal strings or the negative voltage pulse signal strings is 200us, the interval of the pulse signals is 30ms, the number of the pulse signals is 25-35, and the time interval between the starting moments of adjacent pulse signal strings is one half of a gait cycle;
two biostimulation electrodes: the biological stimulation electrodes are respectively fixed at a key site A and a key site B of the spinal cord surface for inducing gait motion through an electrode fixing device, the key site A and the key site B are electrically excited to realize gait reconstruction, the key sites A and B of the spinal cord surface for inducing gait motion are positioned on the dorsal surface of a spinal cord L2 segment, and the electrical excitation pulse is applied to the key sites A and B to generate the action of stepping one of the left and right lower limbs forwards and backwards and change the polarity of the electrical excitation pulse to ensure that the action modes of the left and right lower limbs are exchanged and reversed, wherein the two sites are basically symmetrical relative to the posterior median groove.
The double-electrode electronic system for reconstructing the gait motion function can be applied to animal experiments or rehabilitation training.
The electronic system of the invention generates pulse signals to alternately stimulate the key site A and the key site B, and utilizes a biomedical engineering method of functional electrical stimulation to activate the key site which generates the intrinsic middle neuron network of lower limb rhythmic motion in spinal nerves to generate coordinated motion, thereby effectively reconstructing the lower limb gait motion function in a mode closer to the physiological condition.
The invention activates the neuron network for controlling the gait motion in the spinal cord through the two biostimulation electrodes, regenerates the corresponding biological nerve signal and realizes the recovery of the gait motion function of the injured spinal cord nerve by adopting a microelectronic method. The device of the invention realizes the recovery of the neural function assisted by a microelectronic system, namely the reconstruction of the neural function after spinal cord injury.
Detailed Description
The technical solution in the embodiments of the present invention will be clearly and completely described below with reference to the accompanying drawings in the embodiments of the present invention.
Fig. 1 is a block diagram of a two-electrode electronic system for reconstructing gait movement function according to an embodiment of the invention, the system including: the device comprises an instruction acquisition system, a pulse signal generation system, two biostimulation electrodes and a reference electrode.
The command acquisition system is used for acquiring command information, generating a control command according to the command information and sending the control command to the pulse signal generation system. The instruction acquisition system includes: the device comprises a brain wave signal acquisition module, a voice recognition module, an upper computer signal receiving module and a key module. The brain wave signal acquisition module is used for acquiring brain wave signals and converting the brain wave signals into control instructions. The voice recognition module is used for recognizing the voice signal and converting the voice signal into a control instruction. And the upper computer signal receiving module is used for receiving the control signal sent by the upper computer and converting the control signal into a control instruction. The key module is used for outputting a control instruction through key operation. In this embodiment, the control command includes: "start", "step frequency" and "stop". When the control instruction is 'start', the pulse signal generating system sends pulse signals to the biostimulation electrode, and sets the time interval between the starting moments of adjacent pulse signal strings according to 'step frequency'; when the control command is "stop", the pulse signal generating system stops sending the pulse signal to the biostimulation electrode. Through training, the extraction of the information related to the instruction from the brain wave signal and the voice can be realized. And carrying out hierarchical processing on the step frequency, wherein the hierarchical processing is divided into a plurality of speed grades, and each speed grade corresponds to one time interval.
Receiving a control instruction sent by an instruction acquisition system, and according to the control instructionThe method comprises the steps of generating pulse signals to be sent to two pairs of biostimulation electrodes, wherein the pulse signals are positive voltage pulse signal strings or negative voltage pulse signal strings, and considering that the stimulation threshold of the negative voltage signal is low, the embodiment suggests that the negative voltage pulse signal strings are used for stimulating key sites. In the negative voltage pulse signal string, the pulse width of the pulse signal is 200us, the interval of the pulse signal is 30ms, the number of the pulse signals is 25-35, and the time interval between the starting moments of the adjacent negative voltage pulse signal strings is one half of the gait cycle. The gait cycle can be set according to the step frequency in the control instruction; a fixed gait cycle, such as 4s, may also be used. In this embodiment, the current amplitude range of the pulse signal is-500 to-220μA。
The two biostimulation electrodes are respectively fixed on a key site A and a key site B of the surface of the spinal cord for inducing gait movement through an electrode fixing device, and the reference electrode is arranged at the muscle or the spinal cord within 2cm from the key site. Electrical stimulation is alternately applied to critical site a and critical site B to achieve gait reconstruction. The key points A and B of the gait motion induced by the spinal surface refer to two points which are basically symmetrical relative to the posterior median sulcus, are positioned on the dorsal surface of the spinal L2 segment (in the spinal T12 segment), can generate the action of stepping one of the left lower limb and the right lower limb forwards and backwards by applying an electric excitation pulse to the dorsal surface, and can exchange and invert the action modes of the left lower limb and the right lower limb by changing the polarity of the electric excitation pulse. The coordinate range of the key site A is X = (-0.385 +/-0.182) × L1/2; y = (-0.779 ± 0.147) × L2; the coordinate range of the key site B is X = (+ 0.377 +/-0.196) × L1/2; y = (0.780 ± 0.143) × L2, X is the lumbar spinal cord enlarged transverse diameter direction, Y is the head-tail direction of the spine, and L1 is the width of the lumbar spinal cord enlarged transverse diameter; l2 is the length of spinal T12 segment with the origin of coordinates being the intersection of the posterior median sulcus of the spinal cord and the cephalad cross-section of spinal T12 segment.
The double-electrode electronic system for reconstructing the gait motion function is suitable for being applied to animal experiments or rehabilitation training.
To verify the usability of the present invention, SD rats were tested using the electronic system of this example.
As shown in fig. 2, first, a triggering key site a and a triggering key site B that can trigger the gait movement of the rat are searched, and the following steps are performed:
(1) the posterior median sulcus of the spine and the cephalic side of each segment of the spine are taken as coordinate origins and the transverse radial direction is taken asXAxial, head-to-tail in the spinal cord directionYThe axis, i.e. the stimulation site, can be denoted as: (X,Y) Coordinates of key sites(X,Y) The following treatment is carried out: transverse radial directionXNormalizing by half of the maximum of the transverse diameter of the lumbar spinal cord expansion in the head-tail directionYNormalization is performed with the corresponding spinal segment length.
(2) The spinal cord surface sites with left and right leg alternate motion phenomenon are searched on the spinal cord of the SD rat through epidural electric excitation pulse stimulation.
(3) The polarity of the electric excitation pulse is changed, the reverse position of the rat's left and right legs is observed and the position of the reverse position is recorded(X,Y). Two sites satisfying the above conditions and substantially symmetrical with respect to the posterior median groove were found.
The two biostimulation electrodes of the electronic system are respectively arranged on the surfaces of the two key sites and fixed, and then control instructions are sent out through the brain wave signal acquisition module, the voice recognition module, the upper computer signal receiving module and the key module of the instruction acquisition system, so that gait reconstruction of rats is realized, and feasibility of the electronic system is verified.
As shown in fig. 2 (a), the key site a is excited by a negative pulse signal, and the rat legs are shown in fig. 2 (b), with the left leg stepped forward and the right leg stepped backward. Fig. 2(c) is a left leg joint dynamic change stick diagram, fig. 2(d) is a right leg joint dynamic change stick diagram, as shown in fig. 2 (e), a negative pulse signal excites a key point B, as shown in fig. 2 (f), two legs of a rat are as shown in fig. 2 (f), the left leg is kicked backwards, and the right leg is kicked forwards. FIG. 2(g) is a left leg joint dynamic change stick diagram, and FIG. 2(h) is a right leg joint dynamic change stick diagram. When the negative pulse signal alternately stimulates the key site A and the key site B, the gait motion reconstruction of the rat can be realized.
The invention is not limited to the specific technical solutions described in the above embodiments, and all technical solutions formed by equivalent substitutions are within the scope of the claims of the invention.