The Property of Nerve Excitation Elicited by Magnetic Stimulation of Peripheral Nerve

This study focused on the properties of nerve excitation in response to pulsed electric fields induced by time-varying magnetic fields. We carried out magnetic stimulation of the human brachial plexus by localized and vectorial stimulation using a sequence of rectangular-waveform electric fields induced by trapezoidal-waveform magnetic fields. The results show that the nerve excitation is suppressed when the plateau of the trapezoids is shorter than a certain critical value. We introduced a model to explain this phenomenon. The nerve excitation elicited by magnetically induced electric fields was simulated. A computer simulation showed that the threshold for nerve excitation elicited by a trapezoidal-waveform magnetic field decreases as the plateau of the magnetic field trapezoids is increased.