Silk-Based Self-Unfolding Electrode Array for Minimally-invasive Large-Scale Deep Brain Activity Monitoring

This paper reports a silk-based deep-brain neural interface featuring a deformable microelectrode array paired with a silk scaffold, designed to deployed and proper functioning in the dynamic milieu of the cerebrospinal fluid. The whole microelectrode array can be minimally invasively implanted into deep brain regions with the assistance of commonly used clinical catheters, self-unfold in the lateral ventricles to conformally attach to large-scale subcortical nuclei surfaces, and capture high-quality signals by virtue of the microelectrode’s in-plane shielding. The results represent the inaugural demonstration of recording Parkinsonian electrophysiological biomarkers on the caudate surface in sheep, accompanied by high-accuracy discrimination of pathological neural activity across multiple microelectrode sites.