A high voltage stimulator using a low-Q class-E pulsed radiofrequency driver for animal study of relieving trigeminal neuralgia pain

In this work, an in vivo animal experiment was conducted to show that the pulsed radiofrequency (PRF) stimulation in relieving pain is effective for trigeminal neuralgia. The experiment also reveals that the 10-V stimulation is more effective than 5-V stimulation. Hence, in order to generate a high PRF voltage in a brain stimulator, a low-Q class-E amplifier is proposed to be a high voltage electrical stimulation (ES) driver by controlling the input duty cycle. The steady states of the circuit waveform are represented in two PDEs´ and are numerically solved in math tool to achieve circuit parameters. When the driver was operated under the condition of Q = 1 and D = 0.8, the output peak voltage was measured up to 10 V, which is 3 times of V_DD. The conversion efficiency of the PRF driver was measured 90% that measured load from 300Ω to 1.8kΩ. The efficiency of the low-Q operation is found to be better under mismatched load than in high-Q operation.