Animal Experimental Device for Vagus Nerve Stimulation in the Treatment of Chronic Heart Failure

The absence of efficient animal experimental devices greatly impedes investigating the therapeutic effect of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) on chronic heart failure (CHF). For the requirements of establishing CHF models, the adjustable parameters of VNS and the responses of VNS, this paper designed an active implantable animal experimental device, which integrates fast pacing module, VNS module, hemodynamic detection module and Bluetooth module into a hardware system. Incorporating with the external optimization algorithm, it can seek the optimal solution during adjusting parameters dynamically. The test results indicate the device can generate stimulation pulses with multiple parameters adjustable in wide ranges, which accord with the electrical stimulation characteristics of right ventricles and vagus nerves, respectively. The improved optimization algorithms are also found to have better global search ability. This may provide convenient tool for VNS animal experiments.