Chronic pain
conditions, characterized by persistent or recurrent pain in specific parts of
the body, can be highly debilitating and often significantly reduce the quality
of life of the individuals experiencing them. Statistics suggest that
approximately 20.9% of adults living in the United States have experienced
chronic pain at some point in their lives, while 6.9% have experienced severe
chronic pain that significantly impacted their daily functioning and
well-being.
Currently, chronic pain is primarily treated using
pain-relief medications, many of which are based on opioids. Yet many of these pharmaceutical drugs are highly addictive and have severe side effects, so they often
end up causing more harm than good.
In recent years, some scientists and engineers have
been trying to devise alternative pain-management strategies that do not rely on opioids and can ease the pain of
patients without adversely impacting their health. One proposed solution
entails the use of implantable electrical stimulators, devices that can be
surgically inserted into a patient's body, delivering electrical signals to their nerves or spinal cord to reduce the pain they are experiencing.
Despite their potential for the treatment of chronic pain conditions, most existing implantable electrical stimulators have significant
limitations. In fact, these devices can damage a patient's body during the
surgeries needed to implant them. Moreover, they are often expensive, and the
battery powering them needs to be periodically changed.
Researchers at the University of Southern California
and other institutes recently developed a new flexible, wireless and
battery-free implantable stimulator that could overcome some of the limitations
of previously introduced pain-management solutions. This device, introduced in
a paper published in Nature Electronics,
is powered via an external wearable ultrasound transmitter and also
incorporates machine learning algorithms that can classify a patient's pain
levels, adjusting the intensity of the electrical stimulation that it delivers
accordingly.
"Chronic
pain management typically involves opioids, which are associated with severe side effects such as addiction," Yushun Zeng, Chen Gong, and their
colleagues wrote in their paper.
"Implantable percutaneous electrical stimulators
are a promising alternative approach to pain management. However, they are
expensive, can cause damage during surgery and often rely on a battery power
supply that must be periodically replaced."
The key objective of this recent study was to devise a
less invasive implantable electrical stimulator that can reduce the pain of
patients, and that does not need to be periodically removed to change its
batteries. The ultrasonic wireless implant developed by the researchers is
comprised of a composite piezoelectric receiver, micro-electronic components,
and stimulating electrodes integrated into a flexible printed circuit board.
"We report an integrated, flexible
ultrasound-induced wireless implantable stimulator combined with a pain
detection and management system for personalized chronic pain management,"
wrote Zeng, Gong and their colleagues.
"Power is supplied to the stimulator by a
wearable ultrasound transmitter. We classify pain stimuli from brain recordings
by developing a machine learning model and program the acoustic energy from the
ultrasound transmitter and, therefore, the intensity of electrical
stimulation."
The researchers tested their proposed pain management
system in a series of tests involving rodents that were experiencing varying
levels of pain. They found that their device accurately predicted the levels of
stress experienced by the animal and adapted the electrical stimulations it
delivered accordingly, ultimately easing most of the animal's pain.
"We show that the implant can generate targeted,
self-adaptive and quantitative electrical stimulations to the spinal cord
according to the classified pain levels for chronic pain management in
free-moving animal models," wrote Zeng, Gong and their colleagues.
In the future, the ultrasonic wireless implant developed by this team of researchers could soon be improved and tested in experiments involving other animals, then eventually in human clinical trials. Moreover, its underlying design could inspire the development of other devices that rely on ultrasound technology for the mitigation of chronic pain.
Source: Flexible implant detects pain levels and delivers targeted electrical stimulation wirelessly
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