Special BIC Lecture

Tuesday, Feb 25 @ 1pm dGPCC
Giorgio Bonmassar, Assistant Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School

Written on 2014–02–20.

“Driving Neurons with microscopic magnetic stimulation coils: a new way to tap into the intricate neural circuitry”

Giorgio Bonmassar, Assistant Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Assistant in Neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital

Electrical Stimulation (ES) in the brain has proven therapeutically beneficial for patients suffering from neurological disorders including Parkinsons disease, dystonia, essential tremor, and major depression. Moreover, ES stimulation tools have also proven invaluable for investigating the function of the nervous system. Despite its success, there are significant limitations impeding the ES to reach full clinical potential including: incompatibility with magnetic resonance imaging, limited control of electric fields and decreased performance associated with tissue inflammation. Magnetic stimulation overcomes these limitations but existing devices (i.e., transcranial magnetic stimulation) are large, reducing their translation to chronic applications. Recently, a novel technology, micro-magnetic stimulation (µMS), has proven effective at activating the local neural circuitry in vivo. Specifically, the application of micro-magnetic fields in the vicinity of the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) trans-synaptically activates inferior colliculus (IC) neurons in the rat. Moreover, our group demonstrated that the orientation of the applied µMS fields (relative to the excitable tissue) provides unique activation of neuronal elements not seen with traditional electrical stimulation, a property that possibly can be leveraged to improve experimental or therapeutic goals. The results that will be presented may be of interest for those ready to explore µMS as a prospective tool for clinical and basic neuroscience research applications.