Neural interfaces
purepedantry | October 21, 2008I am a little late to this party, but I do want to talk about this paper in Nature Neuroscience.
Moritz et al. implanted an electrode into a monkey's motor cortex. The electrode was designed to only record from a single neuron at a time. Then the output of that cell -- after a little amplification and transformation in a computer -- was connected to a muscle in the monkey's wrist. Finally, the nerves that innervated that muscle were temporarily anesthetized. The monkey was trained to play a little game that involved moving the wrist muscle to get a reward.
The researchers wanted to know…
purepedantry | April 18, 2008Here is a different approach to measuring brain activity in humans. Researchers in Japan are placing a sheet of electrodes inside the skull but on top of the cortex.
Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop robotic body parts controlled by thought, by placing electrode sheets directly on the surface of the brain. Led by Osaka University Medical School neurosurgery professor Toshiki Yoshimine, the research marks Japan's first foray into invasive (i.e. requiring open-skull surgery) brain-machine interface research on human test subjects. The aim of the research is to…
purepedantry | February 26, 2008Doctors at the University of Navarra have implanted an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) in the youngest patient ever attempted -- a 13 month-old girl:
A team of ear, nose and throat specialists and neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Navarra, led by doctors Manuel Manrique Rodriguez, specialist in ear, nose and throat surgery and Bartolome Bejarano Herruzo, specialist in paediatric neurosurgery, have successfully operated on a 13 month-old girl from Murcia, who had been born deaf due to the lack of auditory nerves. She is the youngest patient in the world who has received an auditory…
purepedantry | December 4, 2006Totally effective, side-effect free treatment of Parkinson's continues to elude physicians, but a study by Deuschl et al in the NEJM shows that we are definitely making progress.
Deuschl et al performed a randomized study that assigned patients into one of two groups. The control group recieved the standard treatment for Parkinson's -- which right now is pharmaceuticals like the drug L-dopa. The experimental group had stimulating electrodes implanted into the subthalamic nuclei (STN) of their brain in addition to treatment with L-dopa. The study shows that the individuals in the…
purepedantry | July 12, 2006The most recent issue of Nature has a paper by the Donoghue lab at Brown about their project implanting an ensemble of electrodes into the motor cortex of a paraplegic. Signals from the electrodes were decoded and used to run a computer program so the patient can literally move the cursor with their mind. This is really incredible stuff. The day is rapidly approaching when we can really help these people.
You can read the article, but the most interesting part is the videos available (without a subscription) here. My favorite is a game of Pong.
Hat-tip: Mind Hacks (by one of the authors…
purepedantry | July 10, 2006Misha at Mind Hacks has a great update on brain-computer interface advances.
purepedantry | July 2, 2006Popular Science has a great article on the recent advances in prosthetics. They hit on one of the topics that I think has been really under-researched: neural to machine interfaces. What you would really like to do with a prosthetic is have it communicate directly to and recieve information directly from the central nervous system. To whit:
Once science figures out better ways to attach artificial limbs, prosthetics themselves need to become smarter, able to act on signals sent directly from the brain. Consider the case of Jesse Sullivan, a power lineman from Dayton, Tennessee, who lost…