A Pneumatic-Based Mechanism for Inserting a Flexible Microprobe Into the Brain

Insertion of flexible microprobes into the brain requires withstanding the compressive penetration force by the microprobes. To aid the insertion of the microprobes, most of the existing approaches use pushing mechanisms to provide temporary stiffness increase for the microprobes to prevent buckling during insertion into the brain. However, increasing the microprobe stiffness may result in acute neural tissue damage during insertion. Moreover, any late or premature removal of the temporary stiffness after insertion may lead to further tissue damage due to brain micromotion or inaccuracy in the microprobe positioning. In this study, a novel pneumatic-based insertion mechanism is proposed which simultaneously pulls and pushes a flexible microprobe toward the brain. As part of the brain penetration force in the proposed mechanism is supplied by the tensile force, the applied compressive force, which the microprobe must withstand during insertion, is lower compared with the existing approaches. Therefore, the microprobes with a critical buckling force less than the brain penetration force can be inserted into the brain without buckling. Since there is no need for temporary stiffness increment, neural tissue damage during the microprobe insertion will be much lower compared with the existing insertion approaches. The pneumatic-based insertion mechanism is modeled analytically to investigate the effects of the microprobe configuration and the applied air pressure on the applied tensile and compressive forces to the microprobe. Next, finite element modeling is conducted, and its analysis results not only validate the analytical results but also confirm the efficiency of the mechanism.