We’ve been covering the development of the BrainGate brain-computer interface system for the last seven years, and we’re glad to see that it’s now at a point where severely disabled tetraplegics are able to control a robotic arm in three dimensional space purely by thinking about it.

The system relies on an implanted 96-channel microelectrode array attached to the brain that records the motor cortex neurons responsible for arm movement. Because the implant reads the very neurons that are normally activated during arm movement, the people in the study didn’t require any explicit training or instruction in operating the roboarm. One of the two people in the study, who last moved her arms effectively before a severe stroke 14 years prior, was able to control the robotic hand to pick up a cup and take a drink from it. See for yourself in this Nature video:

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The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) recently announced plans to deploy CogniSens‘ NeuroTracker system to “improve situational awareness, multiple target tracking and decision making efficiency of soldiers as it relates to combat.” While NeuroTracker isn’t the military’s first computer-based training system, it is the first one that doesn’t involve simulated combat environments.

The premise is simple: the user sits in front of a 3D screen displaying eight moving balls and is then instructed to follow four of the balls for eight minutes, with the remaining four acting as decoys. As the game progresses, it becomes more complex and faster paced. The principle behind the game, according to CogniSens, is that “the brain structurally rewires itself if stimulated intensively and repeatedly…the same way muscle cells improve with physical conditioning.”

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A sultry blues riff may cause some listeners to swoon, while a hypnotic techno-beat can give others a drug-like high, but can low frequency sounds actually treat disease?

According to a study from the University of Toronto in Canada, research suggests that Vibroacoustic Therapy (VAT), which uses vibrations produced by low frequency sounds to “massage” deep parts of the body, could help patients with neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s. The study involved two groups of 20 Parkinson’s patients being treated with five minutes of 30 Hz vibrations. Results showed marked improvement of all symptoms in both groups, including less rigidity, better walking speed, and less tremor. Before you decide to crank up the volume on your speakers and park yourself on your subwoofer, however, keep in mind that the VAT was administered using special transducers that convert the sound to inner body massage. It’s thought that brain waves at a frequency of 40 Hz are the carriers of information that control movement; the transducers are fine tuned to produce vibrations between 20 and 100 Hz, which are almost too low to hear audibly, but whose vibrations can add stimulation to brainwaves.

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The eye has its own connectome, the neuronal network of the retina that processes the incoming signals before it sends them off to the brain. Much of its structure is yet unknown, and now researchers are looking into the powers of crowdsourcing to process the vast amounts of data they have acquired on the structure. Eyewire, developed by neuroscientists at MIT, comprises a game that requires the players to connect the neurons in a small piece of the retina.

The data for analysis consists of a retinal volume with a size of 350×300×60 μm3 that was imaged using serial electron microscopy at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. In total it amounts to about one terabyte of data. Although the analysis of these images to find connectomes can be automated to some extent, a lot of it is still manual work and this can be very time-consuming. By incorporating a game-like element and engaging a crowd from all over the world the researchers hope to speed up their analyses.

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Researchers from MIT and Harvard have recently been testing a better way to analyze epileptic seizures that doesn’t require an EEG cap or an invasive implant.

Sympathetically mediated electrodermal activity has been suggested as containing enough information to profile a seizure. So the research team, doing a study at Children’s Hospital Boston, has shown that using a wrist worn watch-like sensor that measures the electrical conductance in the skin is as effective as EEG in determining the severity of a seizure.

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Thanks to a nifty demonstration by scientists at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL), we’re one step closer to realizing some of the technology from the movie Avatar. These scientists successfully demonstrated the capabilities of a robot controlled by the mind of a partially quadriplegic patient in a hospital 62 miles away.

Mind-controlled robotic systems aren’t exactly new technology, but what made the EPFL system unique is that it didn’t require invasive neural implants in the brain. All that was attached to the patient was a special EEG cap fitted with electrodes to record the patient’s neural signals. The patient merely had to imagine lifting his paralyzed fingers, and almost immediately, the foot-tall robot in Lausanne would move forward.

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The nerves are one of the parts of the body that have the amazing ability to regrow if damaged. This property sometimes gives hope to patients who have suffered a loss of sensation and/or movement in limbs due to trauma. Such natural healing is usually preceded by surgery to suture or graft damaged nerve endings together. Often times, however, reconstructive surgery just isn’t enough for a full recovery.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. have designed an implant that helps  damaged nerves to regenerate. These microscopic devices, known as nerve guidance conduits, or NGC’s, work by providing physical and chemical cues to help nerves grow. Much in the way a garden trellis guides the growth of a vine, these NGC’s, which are made of a biodegradable synthetic polymer material based on polylactic acid, provide channels to promote and guide nerves to grow. Moreover, because of the shape of the NGC’s, the new nerves will form a structure very similar to an undamaged nerve, which researchers hope will also have the functionality of an undamaged nerve too.

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We all know that a damaged or severed spinal cord often leads to paralysis, as the spinal cord is the necessary means by which the brain tells the arms and legs to move. Right now, there are few ways to reanimate a person’s limbs once the damage is done. One neural prosthesis currently available allows a patient to perform a very limited number of hand movements, such as opening and closing a hand, but these are triggered by a series of shoulder shrugs, so the patient still has to have movement in their shoulder.

At Northwestern University in Illinois, neuroscientists have found a way for patients to perform these basic hand movements, and possibly more, without the need of a properly functioning spinal cord. And, these activities are activated the way nature intended to – by simply thinking.

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It is estimated that Alzheimer’s disease will affect 100 million people by 2050, but currently doctors rely on family history and intellectual tests to diagnose patients. Using these current methods, about 20% of patients diagnosed with AD are false positives, and the only definitive way to identify AD is post-mortem analysis of beta-amyloid in the patient’s brain tissue.

Now, Siemens Healthcare has announced an imaging solution which can detect beta-amyloid plaques in the brains of living patients. The new technology utilizes Amyvid, Eli Lilly’s recently FDA approved radioactive agent, to make the plaques visible in PET scanning. Images are captured using Siemens’ Biograph mCT PET-CT, and the company’s 510(k)-pending syngo.PET Amyloid Plaque quantification software can help doctors determine actual amyloid levels. Siemens plans to begin providing Amyvid to imaging centers this June.

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Heads-up displays (HUD) offer the potential of providing all kinds of useful information to their users, but they all suffer from the same problem: their close proximity to the eyes makes it difficult to focus on what’s displayed, limiting their usefulness in many augmented reality applications.

Innovega, a company out of Bellevue, Washington, has developed a contact lens with dual focus capability that allows its wearer to see distant objects normally and at the same time receive a focused image from the proximate display. The technology, originally funded in part with money from the Pentagon, will soon be on its way to U.S. Dept. of Defense labs for evaluation. While initially destined to be applied for military uses, the iOptik lenses may soon be available to consumers for all sorts of applications like augmented reality displays and 3D video.

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