Seungwoo Lee

Electrical stimulation is currently used to treat a wide range of cardiovascular, sensory and neurological diseases. Despite its success, there are significant limitations to its application, 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 (that is, transcranial magnetic stimulation) are large, reducing their translatio

Neural prostheses that stimulate the neocortex have the potential to treat a wide range of neurological disorders. However, the efficacy of electrode-based implants remains limited, with persistent challenges that include an inability to create precise patterns of neural activity as well as difficulties in maintaining response consistency over time. These problems arise from fundamental limitations of electrodes as well as their susceptibility to implantation and have proven difficult to overcom

Flexible polymers have gained much attention in the development of low cost, magnetic resonance compatible, and nonfragile implantable medical devices. However, efficacy of the conventional polymer encapsulations containing hybrid interfaces is limited due to their relatively high moisture absorption and unstable interfacial adhesion in aqueous environments. As an alternative, we report on a monolithic encapsulation platform for neuroprosthetic devices using liquid crystal polymers (LCPs), which

The enhanced electrochemical activity of nanostructured materials is readily exploited in energy devices, but their utility in scalable and human-compatible implantable neural interfaces can significantly advance the performance of clinical and research electrodes. We utilize low-temperature selective dealloying to develop scalable and biocompatible one-dimensional platinum nanorod (PtNR) arrays that exhibit superb electrochemical properties at various length scales, stability, and biocompatibil

MEMS inductors are used in a wide range of applications in micro- and nanotechnology, including RF MEMS, sensors, power electronics, and Bio-MEMS. Fabrication technologies set the boundary conditions for inductor design and their electrical and mechanical performance. This review provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art MEMS technologies for inductor fabrication, presents recent advances in 3D additive fabrication technologies, and discusses the challenges and opportunities of MEMS

Wireless neural stimulators are being developed to address problems associated with traditional lead-based implants. However, designing wireless stimulators on the sub-millimeter scale (<1 mm³) is challenging. As device size shrinks, it becomes difficult to deliver sufficient wireless power to operate the device. Here, we present a sub-millimeter, inductively powered neural stimulator consisting only of a coil to receive power, a capacitor to tune the resonant frequency of the receive

All types of polymer-based MEAs, including silicone/platinum, polyimide/gold, and LCP/gold MEAs, meet the criteria of biocompatibility guided by international standards, ISO 10993-5.

Magnetic stimulation is less sensitive to the inflammatory reactions that plague conventional electrode-based cortical implants and therefore may be useful as a next-generation (implanted) cortical prosthetic. The fields arising from micro-coils are quite small however and thus, their ability to modulate cortical activity must first be established. Here, we show that layer V pyramidal neurons (PNs) can be strongly activated by micro-coil stimulation and further, the asymmetric fields arising fro

Despite ongoing advances in our understanding of local single-cellular and network-level activity of neuronal populations in the human brain, extraordinarily little is known about their "intermediate" microscale local circuit dynamics. Here, we utilized ultra-high-density microelectrode arrays and a rare opportunity to perform intracranial recordings across multiple cortical areas in human participants to discover three distinct classes of cortical activity that are not locked to ongoing natural

In working to improve the quality of visual percepts elicited by retinal prosthetics, considerable effort has been made to understand how retinal neurons respond to electric stimulation. Whereas responses arising from direct activation of retinal ganglion cells have been well studied, responses arising through indirect activation (e.g., secondary to activation of bipolar cells) are not as well understood. Here, we used cell-attached, patch-clamp recordings to measure the responses of rabbit gang

Our results show that how coil design influences the response of cortical neurons to stimulation and are an important step toward the development of next-generation cortical prostheses.

The ciliary epithelium (CE) of adult mammals has been reported to provide a source of retinal stem cells (RSCs) that can give rise to all retinal cell types in vitro. A recent study, however, suggests that CE-derived cells possess properties of pigmented ciliary epithelial cells and display little neurogenic potential. Here we show that the neurogenic potential of CE-derived cells is negatively regulated by ephrin-A3, which is upregulated in the CE of postnatal mice and presents a strong prohibi

Magnetic stimulation delivered via 0.5-mm diameter coils was recently shown to activate retinal neurons; the small coil size raises the possibility that micromagnetic stimulation ( μMS) could underlie a new generation of implanted neural prosthetics. Such an approach has several inherent advantages over conventional electric stimulation, including the potential for selective activation of neuronal targets as well as less susceptibility to inflammatory responses. The viability of μMS for some app

Magnetic stimulation of the nervous system, e.g. transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), has been used both to unravel basic structure and function of the nervous system as well as to treat neurological diseases, i.e. clinical depression. Despite progress in both areas, ongoing advancements have been limited by a lack of understanding of the mechanism by which magnetic stimulation alters neural activity. Here, we report responses of cortical neurons to magnetic stimulation arising from a sub-mi

OBJECTIVE: Electrical stimulation via microelectrodes implanted in cortex has been suggested as a potential treatment for a wide range of neurological disorders. Despite some success however, the effectiveness of conventional electrodes remains limited, in part due to an inability to create specific patterns of neural activity around each electrode and in part due to challenges with maintaining a stable interface. The use of implantable micro-coils to magnetically stimulate the cortex has the po