Internal inconsistencies in models of electrical stimulation in neural tissue

Abstract

Calculating the membrane potential of a neurite under extracellular electrical stimulation is important in the design of some recent stimulation strategies for neuroprosthetic devices including retinal implants, cochlear implants, deep brain stimulation. A common approach, widely used in the electrical stimulation literature uses a volume conductor model to calculate the electrical potential in the tissue and then extracts the voltage or current density on the surface of a neuron, which is used as input to the cable equation to calculate the neuron's response. However this approach ignores the effect of the neuron itself as well as surrounding neurons on the extracellular potential. Here we ..