A low-cost protocol for reconditioning of deep-brain neural microelectrodes with material failure for electrophysiology recording

Up to now, a large variety of neural microelectrodes are developed. Although there are a lot of published works in this area, the majority of them are about the fabrication methods and rarely discuss the reconditioning procedure or how to re-use the electrodes that their performance is decreased because of material failure. In this paper, firstly, it is answered that why the performance of neural microelectrodes decreases. Secondly, a general low-cost protocol for reconditioning and re-using electrodes are proposed that can be utilized for the most types of electrodes with material failure. Lastly, the proposed reconditioning protocol is applied experimentally to single-site tungsten microelectrodes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol. Neural signal recording Results clearly indicate that a large number of electrodes can be reconditioned well.