A method to establish functional vagus nerve topography from electro-neurographic spontaneous activity

Andrea Pitzus; Simone Romeni; Fabio Vallone; Silvestro Micera

doi:10.1016/j.patter.2022.100615

A method to establish functional vagus nerve topography from electro-neurographic spontaneous activity

Patterns (N Y). 2022 Oct 31;3(11):100615. doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100615. eCollection 2022 Nov 11.

Authors

Andrea Pitzus^{1

2}, Simone Romeni³, Fabio Vallone¹, Silvestro Micera^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ The Biorobotics Institute and Department of Excellence in Robotics and AI, Health Interdisciplinary Center, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pontedera, Italy.
² Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (DIEE), University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy.
³ Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Translational Neural Engineering, Center for Neuroprosthetics and Institute of Bioengineering, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Abstract

Bioelectronic medicine is an emerging approach to treat many types of diseases via electrical stimulation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Because the vagus nerve (VN) is one of the most important nerves controlling several ANS functions, stimulation protocols based on knowledge of the functional organization of the VN are particularly interesting. Here, we proposed a method to localize different physiological VN functions by exploiting electro-neurographic signals recorded during spontaneous VN fibers activity. We tested our method on a realistic human cervical VN model geometry implanted via epineural or intraneural electrodes. We considered in silico ground truth scenarios of functional topography generated via different functional neural fibers activities covered by background noise. Our method accurately estimated the underlying functional VN topography by outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our work paves the way for development of spatially selective stimulation protocols targeting multiple VN bodily functions.

Keywords: bioelectronic medicine; electroneurography; function localization; functional anatomy; vagus nerve.