This study was designed to investigate the effect of pudendal and tibial nerve stimulation on vulvar blood perfusion in anesthetized rodents. The pudendal and tibial nerve were stimulated at 20 Hz for 20 minutes in 10 rats. Vulvar blood perfusion was measured before, during, and after stimulation use laser contrast speckle imaging. Then, the experiment was repeated after a thoracic level spinal cord transection. We found that pudendal, but not tibial, nerve stimulation modulates vulvar blood perfusion in this anesthetized, single stimulation model of genital hemodynamics.
Most experiments have 4 text files corresponding to 4 trials that were exported from the Laser Speckle Imaging software. Animals F and G have 20 text files (each trial had 5 text files) and a corresponding "Start Times for Rat F and G" which contains the start times necessary to concatenate the 5 text files together for each trial. The "Text File Compilation" contains the raw voltages from the individual "Exported Text Files" for importing into MATLAB.
Run "mainProcessingScript.m" to process, analyze, and calculate statistics on the raw data. This will output the Processed Data.mat, Trial Data.mat, and Stats Data.mat files.
- Processed Data.mat contains 5 structs that have all the trial information (demographics and waveforms) at 5 different stages of data processing: raw, concatenated, shifted (to align start times), blanked (to remove stimulation artifact), and the final metric extractions (average blood perfusion before, during, and after stimulation).
- Trial Data contains four different structs that separate the data by trial type (Pre SCI Pudendal, Pre SCI Tibial, Post SCI Pudendal, and Post SCI Tibial).
- Stats Data contains four different structs separated in the same manner, but also includes means and standard deviations for each epoch (before, during, and after).
Run "MethodsFigGenerator.m" to recreate figures from the original manuscript.
This project includes the data, analysis, and figures for the manuscript title "Pudendal, but not tibial, nerve stimulation modulates vulvar blood perfusion in anesthetized rodents"
