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Scientists working on thought-controlled cursors
Monday November 19, 2012 07:01:57 PM,
IANS
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Washington: Scientists
are developing brain-implantable sensors that can measure signals
from individual neurons, and decode them to control computer
cursors with thoughts.
When a paralyzed person imagines moving a limb, the brain part
that controls movement acts as if it is activating the immobile
limb.
Despite neurological injury or disease that has severed the
pathway between brain and muscle, the region where the signals
originate remains intact and functional.
Neuroscientists and neuroengineers from Stanford have started
working on the project, which is part of a field known as neural
prosthetics, the journal Nature Neuroscience reports.
The team has developed an algorithm, known as ReFIT, that vastly
improves the speed and accuracy of neural prosthetics that control
computer cursors, according to a Stanford statement.
Krishna Shenoy, professor of electrical engineering,
bioengineering and neurobiology at Stanford, collaborated on the
project with a team led by research associate Vikash Gilja and
bioengineering doctoral candidate Paul Nuyujukian.
In demonstrations with rhesus monkeys, cursors controlled by the
ReFIT algorithm doubled the performance of existing systems and
approached performance of the real arm.
Better yet, more than four years after implantation, the new
system is still going strong, while previous systems have seen a
steady decline in performance over time.
"These findings could lead to greatly improved prosthetic system
performance and robustness in paralyzed people, which we are
actively pursuing as part of the FDA (Food and Drug
Administration) Phase-I BrainGate2 clinical trial here at
Stanford," said Shenoy.
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