A Mathematical Theory of Communication Applied to Peripheral Nerve Lesion and its Recovery.
Antonio Merolli, MD, FBSE
Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
Introduction: In 1948 Claude Shannon published the paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" which later become regarded as the founding paper of the so-called "Information Theory" and the base for the development of digital transmission systems. Shannon realized that the content of the message was irrelevant to its transmission: it could be text, sound, image, or nerve impulses as in our case. It is all 0's and 1's to the channel. We would like to model the peripheral nerve as a digital transmission system and we will relocate some of the Shannon's statements into the anatomy and physiology of a sensory nerve lesion.
Materials and Methods: As "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" shows how every communication system can be separated into components by the following scheme: information source (message) > transmitter (signal) > NOISE > receiver (received signal) > destination (message): we searched for these components into the anatomy and physiology of a sensory nerve lesion.
Results: We translated the classical Shannon's scheme by the following components: sensory stimulus (message) > terminal end (signal) > LESION > synapse in the posterior horn (received signal) > CNS perception (message). A key point is the use of the concept of "redundancy", described as the ratio between bits used to transmit a message and bits of actual information in the message. In our translation, "redundancy" will be the ratio between the number of fibers transmitting a message and the minimum number of fibers needed to relay proper perception. Whatever could be the role played in functional recovery by Brain Plasticity and Information Integration, we do need a minimum number of fibers making a successful match in peripheral nerve regeneration and repair.
Conclusions: Shannon himself realized that his model had "applications not only in communication theory". We applied it to peripheral nerve lesions and their recovery. We found it useful to explain how several surgical repair techniques may work.
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