Extracellular Stimulation of Neural Tissues: Activating Function and Sub-threshold Potential Perspective

Electric stimulation of neural tissues has been an effective clinical intervention to address a variety of pathological issues such as profound deafness, retinal diseases, and Parkinson’s disease. However, the knowledge about the exact mechanism of neural excitation, especially activation sites is still ambiguous. Nevertheless, in silico models utilize two approaches namely activating function and sub-threshold potential to predict the activation sites of neural tissues. This paper studies the applicability of these two approaches to model the electric stimulation of pyramidal neuron and spiral ganglion neurons using finite element models. The simulation results suggest that the activating function could be prone to geometrical irregularities of the neural tissues, yet realistically predicts the activation sites on the myelinated neurons. In contrast, the sub-threshold potential predicts the activation of unmyelinated axons by considering the electrophysiological properties of neural tissues. The present study suggests that it is necessary to choose an appropriate method to estimate the neural activation sites while modeling the extracellular stimulation of neural tissues.