BCIs & Neurotechnology News and Discussions

[wjfox]

Musk start-up Neuralink seeks people for brain-implant trial

1 hour ago

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface (BCI) start-up Neuralink has begun recruiting people for its first human trial.

The company's goal is to connect human brains to computers and it wants to test its technology on people with paralysis.

A robot will help implant a BCI that will let them control a computer cursor, or type, using thoughts alone.

But rival companies have already implanted BCI devices in humans.

Neuralink won US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for its first human clinical trial, in May, a critical milestone after earlier struggles to gain approval.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66865895

[weatheriscool]

New drug offers relief for treatment-resistant epilepsy patients, clinical trial finds
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-10- ... ients.html

In cases where standard therapies fail, a medication called XEN1101 reduces seizure frequency by more than 50% in some patients and sometimes eliminates them altogether, a new study shows. Unlike several treatments that must be started at low doses and slowly ramped up, the new drug can safety be taken at its most effective dose from the start, the authors say.

Focal seizures, the most common type seen in epilepsy, occur when nerve cells in a particular brain region send out a sudden, excessive burst of electrical signals. Along with seizures, this uncontrolled activity can lead to abnormal behavior, periods of lost awareness, and mood changes. While many available therapies control or reduce seizures, they fail to stop seizures in about one-third of patients and may cause harsh side effects, experts say.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, a new clinical trial found that patients who added XEN1101 to their current antiseizure treatments saw a 33% to 53% drop in monthly seizures, depending on their dose. By contrast, those given a placebo had on average 18% fewer seizures during the treatment phase of the trial, which lasted eight weeks.

Most patients then volunteered to extend the trial, with about 18% of those treated with the new drug remaining entirely seizure free after six months, and about 11% having no seizures after a year or longer.

"Our findings show that XEN1101 may offer a swift, safe, and effective way to treat focal epilepsy," said study lead author, neurologist Jacqueline French, MD. "These promising results offer hope for those who have struggled for decades to get their symptoms under control."

[caltrek]

Robotic Prosthetic Ankle Boosts Stability
by Matt Shipman
October 19, 2023

Introduction:

(Futurity) Robotic prosthetic ankles that are controlled by nerve impulses allow amputees to move more naturally, improving their stability, according to a new study.

“This work focused on ‘postural control,’ which is surprisingly complicated,” says Helen Huang, a professor in the joint department of biomedical engineering at North Carolina State University and UNC Chapel Hill and corresponding author of the study in Science Robotics.

“Basically, when we are standing still, our bodies are constantly making adjustments in order to keep us stable. For example, if someone bumps into us when we are standing in line, our legs make a wide range of movements that we are not even necessarily aware of in order to keep us upright.

“We work with people who have lower limb amputations, and they tell us that achieving this sort of stability with prosthetic devices is a significant challenge. And this study demonstrates that robotic prosthetic ankles which are controlled using electromyographic (EMG) signals are exceptionally good at allowing users to achieve this natural stability.”

EMG signals are the electrical signals recorded from an individual’s muscles.

Read more of the Futurity article here: https://www.futurity.org/robotic-prost ... 8602-2

For a presentation of the results of the study as published in Science Robotics: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sc ... s.adf5758

[wjfox]

Pretty damn impressive - check out the video.

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Parkinson's implant restores man's ability to walk

3 hours ago

A man with advanced Parkinson's disease has been helped to walk again with a special implant that stimulates nerves in his spine.

Marc Gauthier, 63, from Bordeaux, France, the first person to try out the device, says it has given him a second chance in life.

He can now walk for miles, when previously he was often housebound and had several falls a day.

The medical team treating him describe the advance in Nature Medicine journal.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67295526

[weatheriscool]

Brain implants revive cognitive abilities long after traumatic brain injury in clinical trial
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-12- ... ities.html
by Stanford University Medical Center

In 2001, Gina Arata was in her final semester of college, planning to apply to law school, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. The injury so compromised her ability to focus she struggled in a job sorting mail.

"I couldn't remember anything," said Arata, who lives in Modesto with her parents. "My left foot dropped, so I'd trip over things all the time. I was always in car accidents. And I had no filter—I'd get pissed off really easily."

Her parents learned about research being conducted at Stanford Medicine and reached out; Arata was accepted as a participant. In 2018, physicians surgically implanted a device deep inside her brain, then carefully calibrated the device's electrical activity to stimulate the networks the injury had subdued. The results of the clinical trial were published Dec. 4 in Nature Medicine.

[weatheriscool]

Research team develops new technology for robotic prosthetic leg control
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-12- ... c-leg.html
by Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST)

A research team led by Professor Sang-hoon Lee at the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology has successfully developed an imperceptive surface electromyography (sEMG) sensor. The sensor is crucial in allowing lower limb amputees to control robotic prosthetic legs as they want and is expected to contribute greatly to rehabilitation and a better quality of life.

With the recent rise in lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, there is a rapidly growing number of additional lower limb amputees. The permanent effects of lower limb amputation are not only physical disability but also psychological disability. To tackle this problem, bionic lower limb technology has been developed in recent years to replace a lost leg with robotic prosthetics.

The most important thing in developing robotic prosthetic legs is to stably implement the lower limb function as intended by amputees, and in order to do so, the ability to rapidly and accurately acquire the amputees' biological signals is required. The most suitable method is to use non-invasive sEMG sensors; however, these sensors are difficult to use in practice.

[weatheriscool]

Real-time dopamine measurement using a flexible probe that minimizes brain damage
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-12- ... mizes.html
by Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST)

A research team led by Jang Kyung-in, a Professor affiliated with the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering at DGIST, developed a dopamine measurement device that can precisely analyze dopamine concentration in real-time while minimizing brain damage.

Because the device facilitates accurate real-time dopamine measurements by using only one flexible brain-implantable probe, it is expected to be used as a core technology for developing customized probes for patients with degenerative brain diseases. The findings are published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

[caltrek]

Hybrid Biocomputer Fuses Human Brain Tissue with Computer Chips
Tom Hale
December 15, 2023

Introduction:

(IFL Science) Scientists have fused human brain tissue to a computer chip, creating a mini cyborg in a petri dish that can perform math equations and recognize speech.

Dubbed Brainoware, the system consists of brain cells artificially grown from human stem cells, which have been fostered to develop into a brain-like tissue. This mini-brain organoid is then hooked up to traditional hardware where it acts as a physical reservoir that can capture and remember the information it receives from the computer inputs.

The researchers wanted to explore the idea of exploiting the efficiency of the human brain’s architecture to supercharge computational hardware. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has massively increased the demand for computing power, but it’s somewhat limited by the energy efficiency and performance of the standard silicon chips.

"We wanted to ask the question of whether we can leverage the biological neural network within the brain organoid for computing. This is just proof-of-concept to show we can do the job," Feng Guo, study author and a bioengineer in the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University, told Tech Xplore.

To flex the muscles of the hybrid bio-computer, the researchers presented it with 240 audio clips of people saying different Japanese vowel sounds. Remarkably, the system is capable of learning the different sounds and recognizing them with approximately 78 percent accuracy.

Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/hybrid-bioc ... ps-72033

caltrek’s comment: Seems like there may be some ethical issues involved not discussed in the article. Maybe it is just me?

[weatheriscool]

Using AI to diagnose autism in children
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-12- ... ldren.html
by Bob Yirka , Medical Xpress

A multi-institutional Korean team of child and adolescent psychologists, behavioral scientists, ophthalmologists and biomedical systems informatics specialists has found that deep-learning-based AI systems can accurately diagnose children with autism. In their study, reported in the journal JAMA Network Open, the group created an autism-diagnosing tool using a learning-based AI system and tested it on human subjects.

Autism, known more formally as autism spectrum disorder, is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by problems with communication, social interaction, and oftentimes, repetitive movements. Prior research has suggested that as many as 1 in 36 people have some degree of autism. Prior research has also shown that the earlier it is diagnosed, the more can be done to help people with the disorder overcome problems that many experience.

[weatheriscool]