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Bioelectronic devices: Long-lived recordings

Nature Biomedical Engineering volume 1, Article number: 0048 (2017) Cite this article

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A silicon dioxide passivation layer dramatically lengthens the operational lifetime of flexible electronic arrays for cardiac electrophysiology.

Recording cellular electrical activity in vivo is challenging. Today's electronics are still hard to integrate into biological tissues, especially for sustained operation1. In fact, the inherent mechanical and chemical mismatches between biological tissues and traditional bioelectronic devices have led to device failure, mostly because of the foreign-body response2 and of material degradation by biological fluids. During the past decade, bioelectronic interfaces have been designed with flexible architectures (typically by using ultrathin or porous designs3,4) and with mechanical properties similar to those of tissues3. However, surface passivation of bioelectronic devices remains a significant challenge, in particular because flexible architectures typically exhibit high surface-area-to-volume ratios and contain polymeric components (which cannot sustain the high temperatures needed for depositing a dense passivation layer).

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Figure 1: High-density electrophysiological mapping of the heart by means of stable and capacitively coupled transistor arrays.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Menahem Y. Rotenberg and Bozhi Tian are at the James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, 60637, Illinois, USA

    Menahem Y. Rotenberg & Bozhi Tian

  2. Bozhi Tian is also at the Department of Chemistry, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA and at the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.,

    Bozhi Tian

Authors
  1. Menahem Y. Rotenberg
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  2. Bozhi Tian
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Correspondence to Bozhi Tian.

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Rotenberg, M., Tian, B. Bioelectronic devices: Long-lived recordings. Nat Biomed Eng 1, 0048 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0048

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0048

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