neurodudes

(UPDATE 03-05-2007 - Upon closer inspection, it is clear that while the surgery has enabled the woman to have sensation in the nerves of her missing hand when the surface of her chest is touched, the arm she is fitted with at the time of publication did not relay sensory signals from the arm back to her chest. As soon as she is fitted with an arm that has the appropriate sensors, however, she will not have to undergo further surgery to have this kind of direct feedback. Thanks to astute readers for pointing this out.)

The Guardian reports on an article published today in the Lancet about a successful surgical procedure giving an amputee a bionic arm that both responds to motor commands from her remaining motor nerves to control it and provides sensory feedback to sensory nerves when it is touched. If there was any doubt left, the worlds of neural prosthetics and brain-machine interfaces have officially collided.

The Lancet article is accompanied by two movies of the woman using the arm that you should really check out.

Given the recent progress in the decoding of motor signals from the brain and older progress on sensory feedback from neural prosthetics, this was to be expected. Nonetheless, watching this woman use her arm brings the message home in a visceral way. The spooky thesis of MIT CSAIL’s Rodney Brooks that “we will become a merger between flesh and machines” is one step closer today.

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Brain stimulation and depression has been one of the hot topics of the last decade. Now, a Washington Post story suggests that at least some of this may be overrated, at least for the NeuroStar Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) device from Neuronetics:
A novel machine designed to treat depression by zapping the brain with magnetic pulses shows no clear evidence of working, federal health advisers concluded Friday.

A clinical trial of the device provided results that, in one analysis, suggested it’s no better than sham treatment, according to FDA documents.”

Going to be a long slog. TMS *has* been approved for treating depression in Canada and Israel, for the company NeoPulse.

This paper describes some stuff that UCLA is doing with their neuroengineering program. Of particular interest is an ongoing project to develop networks of miniature wireless computers (”motes”) to support wireless MEA recording and stimulation (within section B, ” Improving Headstages for BCI Systems”).

The system is being built with Mica nodes, which are mesh-networking sensor motes about the size of a U.S. quarter, but I’m not sure if they are using mesh networking in this project. More details here.

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Riken tournament video

You win by producing alpha waves. Unfortunately, a Mindball set is a little expensive. Perhaps OpenEEG is the way to go? Here’s another build-your-own-EEG guide. Google also finds various people’s experiences trying to build their own EEGs according to these guides. Are there any other build-your-own EEG guides out there? Post a comment and let us know.

Also, I hope that all the homemade EEG folks know about OpenStim, and vice versa.

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Dear Members,
I am a prospective graduate student interested in taking up Neural Engineering under EE or Biomedical Engg for research. But I have a lot of concerns and need help from a person who knows about the field well.
1. I have studied VLSI, DSP, Image Processing, Wireless Communication, Control Systems and Embedded Systems as graduate and undergraduate courses and have some research interest in Neural Networks and Machine Learning(That’s how I got interested in Neural Engg and Prosthetics). Which of these subjects will be of help in Neural Engg/Prosthetics research. Which will be of most relevance. Please list them in the order of relevance(high->low).
2. What are the applications of the research ?
3. What is the research and JOB scope for this field? Are there any companies who recruit people with this specialisation? How is the job scene in academia? How many univs are doing research in this field in US? Please let me know about the career progression in academia, like how much time does it take to get full time academic position after PhD?
4. Especially, what are the applications of this research in Robotics?
5. What are the current problems and research themes in universities?
6. What imaging technologies are used in this research?

Though my queries may seem a bit ameteuristic, it is very important for me to get clarity on these doubts.
Hope my queries will be answered.
Thanking all of you in advance,
sudhi

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a popular technology for stimulating human cortical neurons, due to its safety, noninvasiveness, and efficacy. A TMS device is just a little coil of wire, through which 10,000 Amps of current is cranked during a period of only a few hundred microseconds; the resultant rapidly-changing magnetic field induces eddy currents in the brain. Depending on the protocol used, TMS can drive/inhibit a region of cortex corresponding to roughly a cubic centimeter or two, and is being explored for the treatment of depression, the reduction of auditory hallucinations during schizophrenia, and the alleviation of tinnitus and migraines. Thousands of papers on medicine and psychology have been written using this tool.

Yet the device itself is expensive and rare — they can run from $20,000 to $50,000 or even more, despite the fact that they are, in essence, a coil, a switch, a bank of capacitors, and a power supply. Much of the art lies in making the devices safe and fail-proof. Is it possible to hack/engineer a system that is safe, fault-tolerant, efficacious, and inexpensive? And furthermore, can we facilitate a community that will devise such devices, and share information about protocols and approaches to brain hacking?

This past August at Foo Camp, a hackers’ conference in Northern California, a group of people got together and set out to do just that. We are designing a safe, noninvasive, modular, and “open source” brain stimulator that will open up the field of circuit modulation to a wider audience. Members of the group include therapists and mental health professionals, engineers, programmers, and others interested in either the development of such devices, or the sharing of information on this front. Key to the design is safety — we want to make sure that the devices we create are as safe as devices on the market. Also, all the information is released under the Creative Commons “Attribution and Sharealike” license. This is a new model for “open source” medical device development — which may move it beyond the domain of simply creating “cool toys,” and to creating real devices.

You can find out more information, or contribute to the project, or learn from the project, at
http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/

-Ed

Today MIT’s Technology Review magazine released its annual list of innovators under the age of 35 who were nominated for recognition. Interestingly, almost a full quarter are doing work relating to or impacting the field of neuroengineering — including ways to tag synapses with quantum dots, activate neurons remotely, improve machine vision, classify whole-brain states for prosthetic purposes, and make nanowire arrays.

http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/

The July 13 issue of Nature included some neural prosthetics papers, one of which was the paper reporting 9 months of stimulation of Matthew Nagle, a tetraplegic who received the first trial of the 96-electrode BrainGate implant in his right precentral gyrus (motor cortex (MI) for arm). The authors were Leigh R. Hochberg, Mijail D. Serruya, Gerhard M. Friehs, Jon A. Mukand, Maryam Saleh, Abraham H. Caplan, Almut Branner, David Chen, Richard D. Penn and John P. Donoghue.

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Im a molecular/cellular neurobiologist. I do however, have a deep interst in neural prosthetics, bionics research. Is there a place for me in this field?

{alpha}-Synuclein Blocks ER-Golgi Traffic and Rab1 Rescues Neuron Loss in Parkinson’s Models — Cooper et al., Science

Fascinating evidence pointing toward a treatment for parkinson’s. Basically, Lindquist’s group finds that overexpression of a trafficking protein Rab1 that moves folded proteins from the ER to the Golgi can prevent alpha-synuclein accumulation-triggered death of rat neurons.

Of course, in vitro is not in vivo. And, for all we know, Parkinson’s could be a complex, multi-mechanism disease. But this looks promising!

Abstract:

Alpha-synuclein misfolding is associated with several devastating neurodegenerative disorders including Parkinson’s Disease (PD). In yeast cells and in neurons {alpha}Syn accumulation is cytotoxic, but little is known about its normal function or pathobiology. The earliest defect following {alpha}Syn expression in yeast was a block in endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to Golgi vesicular trafficking. In a genome-wide screen, the largest class of toxicity modifiers were proteins functioning at this same step, including the Rab GTPase Ypt1p, which associated with cytoplasmic {alpha}Syn inclusions. Elevated expression of Rab1, the mammalian YPT1 homolog, protected against {alpha}Syn-induced dopaminergic neuron loss in animal models of PD. Thus synucleinopathies may result from disruptions in basic cellular functions that interface with the unique biology of particular neurons to make them especially vulnerable.