Multi-site stimulation (Conference Presentation)

The combination of optogenetics and optical imaging modalities has become a popular tool for the investigation of neurovascular coupling. Developing a closed-loop hemodynamic control system capable of dynamically following various blood flow patterns could be beneficial to the causal investigation of neurovascular coupling. To develop this closed-loop hemodynamic control system, we have added a compensator to create a loop consisting of optogenetic stimulation, neural activities, neurovascular coupling, the evoked hemodynamic response, and a blood flow monitoring device to continuously minimize the difference between the recorded blood flow values and desired blood flow patterns. A Real-time Doppler Optical Coherence Tomography (D-OCT) is employed in this study to monitor the cross-sectional velocity profile of a vessel at a frame rate of 71 frames per second. At the same time, a proportional-derivative compensator is used to continuously adjust the pulse width of a 450nm pulsed laser that delivers 15 Hz photostimulation to the cerebral cortex of Thy1-Channelrhodopsin-2 mice. For each vessel, time-varying desired patterns and stimulation parameters were chosen according to the effect of pulse width modulation on its hemodynamic response, then proportional and derivative gains were tuned to produce a near-critically damped response. After parameter optimization, the closed-loop hemodynamic compensator successfully controlled the blood flow in middle cerebral artery branches.