A Scoping Review of Machine Learning Applied to Peripheral Nerve Interfaces

Abstract

Peripheral nerve interfaces (PNIs) can enable communication with the peripheral nervous system and have a broad range of applications including in bioelectronic medicine and neuroprostheses. They can modulate neural activity through stimulation or monitor conditions by recording from the peripheral nerves. The recent growth of Machine Learning (ML) has led to the application of a wide variety of ML techniques to PNIs, especially in circumstances where the goal is classification or regression. However, the extent to which ML has been applied to PNIs or the range of suitable ML techniques has not been documented. Therefore, a scoping review was conducted to determine and understand the state of ML in the PNI field. The review searched five databases and included 63 studies after full-text review. Most studies incorporated a supervised learning approach to classify activity, with the most common algorithms being some form of neural network (artificial neural network, convolutional neural network or recurrent neural network). Unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are currently underutilized and could be better leveraged to improve performance in this domain.