A Mathematical Modeling of Infrared Neural Stimulation

Electrical stimulation is the gold standard for artificial neural stimulation. The greatest disadvantage with electrical stimulation is that it scatters in space and it is difficult to achieve specific point stimulation. Recently, infrared stimulation attracted attention to address this issue. Infrared stimulation works on the principle of heating the tissue, exploiting the energy of infrared lasers to heat the cellular aqueous solution that helps transfer the energy to the cell membrane without direct contact, and provides a discrete localization of stimulation as it does not spread in space like electric fields. In the present study, a heat transfer model for the temperature distribution was evaluated for infrared heating. All calculations were done for an aqueous medium, which can be a good initial representative of conditions in the human body, as it is comprised 60% of water. The Laplace transform was used to convert the convoluted function within the heat equation to a linear function. The variables were plotted to help identify and predict the most effective temperatures on the surface of neuron/cell that will be activated. This project describes the formulation of deriving temperature profiles used to predict optimal temperatures to activate neurons using advanced calculus tools