ELFT HÍRADÓ

[Biro Tamas <biro.tamas AT wigner.mta.hu>]

Dear Colleagues,

our next Wigner Colloquium / Wigner kollokvium about


Development of a continuously active, wireless brain machine interface 
to restore voluntary movement following spinal cord injury

will be given by Prof. Lee Miller,

 On Tuesday Mar 12, 2019, 2:00 PM → 3:00 PM  Central Europe/Budapest 
time,

In the meeting room in building 1, KFKI campus

Abstract:

Spinal cord injury is devastating, and there is currently no real 
treatment. Ultimately, we’d want to regrow the spinal cord, but in the 
meantime, it is now possible to literally reconnect the brain and 
muscles electronically. I will describe experiments in which we record 
signals directly from a monkey’s brain, translate them into appropriate 
control signals, and send them to an electrical stimulator that causes 
muscles to contract. This “Brain Machine Interface” (BMI) allows 
voluntary control of paralyzed muscles and could be used to restore 
movement to human patients with spinal cord injury. Although the 
technology of existing BMIs, is remarkable, the vast majority require 
the user to be wired to stationary equipment and allow only intermittent 
control of a computer cursor or a disembodied robotic limb. The 
associated control algorithms must be regularly recalibrated to 
compensate for the changing neurons recorded by the chronically 
implanted microelectrode arrays. We have developed new methods based on 
autoencoding neural networks, capable of extracting low-dimensional 
“latent signals” from wireless neural recordings. The resulting signals 
appear to be stable over months-long periods. We aim to restore 
voluntary hand use to the monkeys in their home cages 24 hours a day, 
without explicit recalibration. The approach should also allow us to 
study the brain’s representation of movement across a range of motor 
behaviors that has not previously been possible, and to study the 
process of adaptation to the prosthesis that a human patient would 
undergo as we work to move the interface, decoder, and control 
technology from the lab to the clinic.


All interested ones are herewith cordially invited to join.

Tamás Biró.