Cut wires: The Electrophysiology of Regenerated Tissue

When nerves are damaged by trauma or disease, they are still capable of firing off electrical command signals that originate from the brain. Furthermore, those damaged nerves have an innate ability to partially regenerate, so they can heal from trauma and even reinnervate new muscle targets. For an amputee who has his/her damaged nerves surgically reconstructed, the electrical signals that are generated by the reinnervated muscle tissue can be sensed and interpreted with bioelectronics to control assistive devices or robotic prostheses. No two amputees will have identical physiologies because there are many surgical options for reconstructing residual limbs, which may in turn impact how well someone can interface with a robotic prosthesis later on. In this review, we aim to investigate what the literature has to say about different pathways for peripheral nerve regeneration and how each pathway can impact the neuromuscular tissue’s final electrophysiology. This information is important because it can guide us in planning the development of future bioelectronic devices, such as prosthetic limbs or neurostimulators. Future devices will primarily have to interface with tissue that has undergone some natural regeneration process, and so we have explored and reported here what is known about the bioelectrical features of neuromuscular tissue regeneration.