Stimulation of the pig vagus nerve to modulate target effect versus side effect

Study Purpose: Study the effects of spatially-selective vagus nerve stimulation in swine on target effects (heart rate) and side-effects (muscle activation).

Data Collection: Electrophysiology (ENG + EMG) and vital signs recordings.

Primary Conclusion: Spatially selective stimulation is able to favorably stimulate the efferent or afferent mode within the vagus nerve.

Curator's Notes

Experimental Design: Experimental Design: An FDA investigational device exemption approved six-contact epineural cuff(ImThera, LivaNova, London, UK) was used to deliver VNS in pigs and quantified how epineural electrode location impacts on- and off-target VNS activation. Detailed post-mortem histology was conducted to understand how the underlying neuroanatomy impacts observed functional responses. All procedures were performed on the right cervical VN in acute terminal studies under isoflurane anesthesia and lasted 10-12 hours. A heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP), saturation of peripheral oxygen (SpO2), blood glucose levels (BGL), end-tidal carbon dioxide (CO2) via capnography, electroneurogram (ENG) of the VN via longitudinal interfascicular electrodes (LIFE), and electromyogram (EMG) of deep neck muscles were recorded.

Completeness: This dataset is part of a larger study: Stimulation of the pig vagus nerve to modulate target effect versus side effect.

Subjects & Samples: Male (n=2) and female (n=4) adolescents University of Wisconsin minipigs were used in the study weighing 45 ± 3.8 kg.

Primary vs derivative data: Primary data is organized by the subject ID. Within each subject, a folder titled 'perf-sub-' and a folder titled 'sam-*sub-/histology' can be found. The histology folder contains histology from the right vagus nerve at the level of the stimulating cuff. The Duke modeling dataset (https://doi.org/10.26275/hybx-ggbt) was based on these images. Each folder titled 'perf-pnpig*' contains the electrophysiology data recorded via TDT. The folder titled vitals contains vital signs data recorded via LabChart. Specifically, it contains the proprietary LabChart timeseries data in the *.adicht file, the pertinent heart rate, and blood pressure used for analysis in the *.mat file, and a conversion of all time series data to text format in the *.txt file. Within the '' folder, there is a 'Experimental Log.xlsx'; this experimental log describes the test conditions used for each subject as well as the distances from the neural recording electrodes (LIFE) to the stimulating cuff (ImThera). It is also used to generate metadata when running the provided code. Image data in the derivative folder (JPEG2000 and OME-TIFF) was derived from primary images (.tif). Primary images were converted with lossless compression to JPEG2000 (.jpx)and to OME-TIFF (.tif) by MBF Bioscience.

Code Availability: Run the plotting scripts in the dataset using provided code. To run the provided code, first, the pyeCAP package will need to be installed (https://github.com/ludwig-lab/pyeCAP).