Blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction plays an
important role in cellular damage in neurological diseases and brain injuries.
This project employs an innovative in vivo imaging technology that explores
how BBB injury causes negative tissue response to neural probes. This in turn directs future probe designs.
Penetrating recording microelectrode
arrays are a crucial component of numerous human neuroprosthetics. Obtaining
selective, high fidelity, long-lasting readouts of brain activity is a critical
technology across basic and applied neuroscience that impacts learning and
memory studies as well as motor, pre-motor, and visual cortex neuroprostheses
and brain-computer interfaces. However, implantation of cortical
microelectrodes causes a reactive tissue response, which results in a degradation
of the preferred functional single-unit performance over time, thus limiting
the device capabilities. Insertion of neural probes or microelectrodes
inevitably disrupts the blood-brain barrier (BBB) integrity and causes
microhemorrhages that have been shown to trigger the inflammatory tissue
response cascade. The degree of microhemorrhaging from probe insertion has been
shown to be uncontrollable and difficult to reproduce across implants,
mirroring the large variability in inflammatory tissue responses and chronic
recording success. We hypothesize that the level of BBB damage impacts chronic
neural recording quality. 
This project aims to isolate and characterize recording failure caused by BBB disruption and
BBB occlusion by quantifying structural, cellular, and molecular level tissue
response to chronic implants in the brain in real time through combining
multiphoton imaging technology and neural engineering technology. A dynamic understanding of the interfaces is necessary
for elucidating the mechanism(s) behind neural recording failure. This work has
the potential to output basic and clinical science level knowledge relevant to neural
engineering, ischemia, stroke, intracortical hemorrhage, aneurysm, traumatic
brain injury, and closed-loop neurostimulation.
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