Release date: 2016-11-16

The new implant is part of a brain-computer interface that helps the patient spell words and sentences. And more importantly, this interface can be used almost anywhere, allowing her to talk to friends even outdoors, without the need for medical experts to help.

Hanneke de Bruijne demonstrates the system

"This is the first time in history," Nick Ramsay, a neuroscientist and lead researcher at the Utrecht University School of Medicine in the Netherlands, told CNN. "This is a fully implantable system that can work at home without any experts. Assistance."

The female patient was named Hanneke de Bruijne, who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2008, and soon after, her nerve cells completely shrank.

In less than two years, she changed from a healthy person to a patient who could not breathe without a ventilator. She could no longer move or talk.

Before Ramsey met de Bruijne, she communicated with the outside world through a system that tracked her eye movements, allowing her to select specific words and letters that appeared on the computer screen to form sentences.

But even this method may not be used for a long time. Like Jessica Hamzelou, which was reported by New Scientist, she is one of three patients who lost their athletic ability and even eye movements due to ALS.

Ramsey wanted to figure out how to design a system that didn't rely on any form of physical motion at all (the famous system used by Stephen Hawking relied on the patient's control of their facial muscles).

This means creating a new thing - the idea reading device.

Over the past decade or two, we have seen many different types of brain implant devices for patients who have paralyzed or lost limbs, but this technology is still a very new technology, most of the research is in The progress in the experiment is slow, and there are very few achievements that can get out of the lab and enter people's homes. Ramsey and his team wanted to create a device that would allow users to use it at home without the need for ongoing supervision by medical professionals.

"Somehow, they never made a breakthrough and became a clinical application," he told CNN. "No one can let it work at home."

The device is surgically implanted in the brain with two electrodes mounted in the motor area of ​​the cerebral cortex, through which the user can control movement.

The exact location of these electrodes is critical – one must be installed in the brain for the right hand movement and the other will start working when you want to count down.

These electrodes are connected to a pacemaker-sized transmitter mounted on the chest of de Bruijne, and the transmitter can communicate wirelessly with the computer screen in front of her.

When de Bruijne looks at the screen, she sees a movable cursor on the virtual keyboard. When the cursor moves over the letter she wants to select, she must imagine that the right hand clicked on the letter.

Schematic diagram of the working principle of brain machine interface

Of course, de Bruijne can't use her right hand, but her brain can still send motion instructions, and the electrodes collect the signals, pass them to the transmitter, and pass them to the computer and screen.

After only six months of training, de Bruijne has been able to use the system normally, and the typing accuracy rate has reached 95%.

System equipment schematic

"Using the device to communicate is a slow process - even if it takes a few minutes to spell a word - but as the training progresses, de Bruijne spells faster and faster," Hamzelou said in the report.

"In the beginning, she took more than 50 seconds to pick a letter - now she only needs to spend more than twenty seconds."

Although there are some doubts about implanting machinery in patients, de Bruijne believes that the new system is making her more confident and more willing to communicate with others, especially in situations where natural light is strong enough to cause eye tracking devices to fail.

"Now I can go out and communicate with people when the eye tracking computer is not working," she told Hamzelou. "I became more confident and independent."

Of course, so far, this system has only been tested on one patient, although this is a huge breakthrough, the research team is also transferring equipment to Bruijne's home, but it may not be so in the next invited patient Success, we can only be cautiously optimistic about this.

Ramsey's next goal is to speed up the communication speed of de Bruijne by adding electrodes. He hopes to develop this system into 30 to 60 electrodes in the future, which can decode sign language and internal speech faster.

"At that time you can spell the sign language of deaf people." He told CNN, "This is our goal."

This study has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

• Paper: Fully Implanted Brain – Computer Interface in a Locked-In Patient with ALS in a patient with atresia syndrome with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)

For patients with severe paralysis and loss of speaking ability, there are not many options for communicating with the outside world. We describe a method for communication in patients with advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which involves a fully implantable brain-computer interface, which includes A subdural electrode mounted in the cerebral cortex motor zone and a transmitter mounted under the skin on the left side of the chest. By attempting to move the hand on the other side of the implanted electrode, the patient has been able to accurately and independently control a computer typing process 28 weeks after being implanted with the electrode, and can print 2 letters in about one minute. This brain-computer interface provides an automated communication method that can complement and sometimes replace the patient's eye tracking device.

Source: Arterial Network

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