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In silico assessment of electrophysiological neuronal recordings mediated by magnetoelectric nanoparticles

Ilhan Bok, UW-Madison
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Magnetoelectric materials hold untapped potential to revolutionize biomedical technologies. Sensing of biophysical processes in the brain is a particularly attractive application, with the prospect of using magnetoelectric nanoparticles (MENPs) as injectable agents for rapid brain-wide modulation and recording. Recent studies have demonstrated wireless brain stimulation in vivo using MENPs synthesized from cobalt ferrite (CFO) cores coated with piezoelectric barium titanate (BTO) shells. CFO–BTO core-shell MENPs have a relatively high magnetoelectric coefficient and have been proposed for direct magnetic particle imaging (MPI) of brain electrophysiology. However, the feasibility of acquiring such readouts has not been demonstrated or methodically quantified.

In order to evaluate the feasibility of using MENPs for recording neural activity, we created a custom COMSOL model for MENP response quantification. Our strain-based model is versatile and adaptable to different materials and geometries if material parameters are known. Our study, its results, and source files are open source and source files can be found here: https://github.com/ilhanbok/InSilicoNeuronalMENPs

Citation:

Bok I, Haber I, Qu X, Hai A. In silico assessment of electrophysiological neuronal recordings mediated by magnetoelectric nanoparticles. Sci Rep. 2022 May 19;12(1):8386. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-12303-4. PMID: 35589877; PMCID: PMC9120189.

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