Towards model-based characterization of individual electrically stimulated nerve fibers

Neuroprosthetics, such as cochlear implants or deep brain stimulators, can restore parts of the function of an impaired system. To improve such prosthetics, a detailed understanding of the electrical stimulation of nerve fibers is required. This knowledge can best be represented by computational models of the process. Currently, most models of individual electrically stimulated nerve fibers are based on many different datasets, which mainly consist of the average analysis values of recordings of many nerve fibers. While this is a valid approach for understanding the basic phenomena, both the combination of many different datasets and the average analysis can confound details in the response of the nerve fiber. To improve computational models of electrically stimulated nerve fibers further, we propose an optimization procedure that can fit the parameters of a neuron model to the response of a single nerve fiber to pulse-train stimulation. We show that in this way, the model can reproduce a wide variety of fiber responses of electrically stimulated auditory nerve fibers of guinea pigs in a remarkably detailed way on a scale of less than 1 ms. We analyze and discuss the certainty and generalizability of the parameter sets thus exposed. The model parameters found by the optimization procedure can then form the basis for a detailed fiber-by-fiber analysis, which we illustrate by a correlation analysis of the predicted phenomena (e.g., spike latency and refractory period) in the fiber response.