Paper BI-WeE8
Thin Films, Coatings and Surface Solutions for Medical Devices

Wednesday, December 5, 2018, 8:00 pm, Room Naupaka Salon 6-7

As medical device manufacturers are pressed to design ever-smaller devices with increasingly long service life, optimizing the performance and profile of each component becomes more crucial. During the past few decades, various medical devices, for instance cardiac rhythm management and neurostimulation devices, have been invented and used in clinical practice to achieve electrical stimulation. These devices function via artificial stimulation of living tissue through transfer of an external electrical signal to an implantable electro-conductive microelectrode across to the membrane of the neural cells or tissue. These electrodes and their surface properties have been a focus for innovation at the Center for Coatings and Surface Solutions (CCSS) to give the next-generation devices a competitive edge via advances in coatings technology that can enable electrodes with better charge exchange capacity, thereby improving accuracy and efficacy of treatment – while also extending the devices’ battery life. In developing these electrodes, the substrate, its surface, and its interface with the electrolytic physiological environment all play important roles in the stimulation process. This presentation will focus on the process development and characterization of coatings that exhibit high electrochemically-active surface areas for implantable stimulation devices. In particular, effect of various electrode surface treatment technologies on microstructural characteristics will be discussed. The results presented in this work demonstrate an unprecedented approach that has facilitated discovery of many unique features in these coatings, and the effect of electrode surface on coating surface and sub-surface features.