Vagus sinirinin optik uyarımı

The Vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve, innervates to the neck, abdomen, and colon. The vagus nerve is also a clinically significant nerve that controls parasympathetic actions in visceral organs like the heart, lungs. Moreover, electrical nerve stimulation of the vagus nerve is a treatment methodology for epilepsy. Optical nerve stimulation is an alternative technique that uses infrared light to stimulate nerve cells. The relatively new technique has three main advantages over conventional electrical nerve stimulation: (1) a non-contact method of nerve stimulation; (2) improved spatial selectivity; (3) elimination of stimulation artifacts. Sciatic nerve and cavernous nerve are some examples of optical nerve stimulation. Despite all of the neural targets, optical vagus nerve stimulation has not been investigated in a rat model. This thesis investigates the effect of optical vagus nerve stimulation in an in-vivo rat model. An infrared diode laser was used to stimulate the vagus nerve at a wavelength of 1505 nm in continuous-wave mode. Arterial pressure and electrocardiography signals were obtained to understand nerve stimulation's effectiveness using laser radiation on the vagus nerve. Successful optical nerve stimulation of the rat vagus nerve was observed in terms of arterial pressure. Arterial pressure was significantly decreased during optical vagus nerve stimulation after the nerve surface reached a temperature of ~42 °C. However, optical nerve stimulation had no side effects on electrocardiogram signals, despite electrical nerve stimulation having side effects on the heart like bradycardia and arrhythmia. Histological analysis also showed that optical nerve stimulation is safe until ~46 °C.