Extracellular potentials of human motor myelinated nerve fibers in normal case and in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Abstract

The extracellular potentials of human motor myelinated fibres in an unbounded volume conductor, in normal case and in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are studied. Using our previous double-cable models of the fibres, the spatial and temporal distributions of the intracellular potentials are obtained. The intracellular potentials are then used as input to a line source model that allows to calculate the corresponding spatial and temporal distributions of the extracellular potentials at various radial distances in the surrounding volume conductor. For the normal and ALS cases, the radial decline of the peak-to-peak amplitude of the extracellular potential depends on the radial distance of the field point and increases with the increase of the distance. For given radial distances, two cases of spatial distributions of the extracellular potentials are investigated: the first case, based on the intracellular potentials at the times of nodal potential maxima and the second case, based on the intracellular potentials at the time interval from 0.2 ms to 1.0 ms at increments of 0.1 ms. For the same radial distances, the temporal distributions of the extracellular potentials are also explored. It is shown that in the case of adaptation, the temporal distributions of the extracellular potentials in the normal and ALS cases correspond well with electromyograms (EMG) from healthy subjects and ALS patients as reported in the literature. Simulation results indicate that the used models are rather promising tools in studying the main properties of compound action potentials in ALS patients which up till now have not been sufficiently well understood.