Deans' stroke musings: Noninvasive brain-computer interface enables communication after brainstem stroke

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Noninvasive brain-computer interface enables communication after brainstem stroke

How many decades before this gets rolled out to your hospital? A great stroke association would be personally contacting every single stroke department head and getting commitments to stay up-to-date on all stroke rehab. This is absolutely necessary since the hospital is waiting on somebody else to solve the problem. Depending on the response is whether the good cop or the bad cop would show up.
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/257/257re7

+ Author Affiliations

¹Department of Psychology, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN 37614, USA.
²Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC 27106, USA.

↵*Corresponding author. E-mail: sellers@etsu.edu

AbstractBack to Top

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide communication that is independent of muscle control, and can be especially important for individuals with severe neuromuscular disease who cannot use standard communication pathways or other assistive technology. It has previously been shown that people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can successfully use BCI after all other means of independent communication have failed. The BCI literature has asserted that brainstem stroke survivors can also benefit from BCI use. This study used a P300-based event-related potential spelling system. This case study demonstrates that an individual locked-in owing to brainstem stroke was able to use a noninvasive BCI to communicate volitional messages. Over a period of 13 months, the participant was able to successfully operate the system during 40 of 62 recording sessions. He was able to accurately spell words provided by the experimenter and to initiate dialogues with his family. The results broadly suggest that, regardless of the precipitating event, BCI use may be of benefit to those with locked-in syndrome.

Citation: E. W. Sellers, D. B. Ryan, C. K. Hauser, Noninvasive brain-computer interface enables communication after brainstem stroke. Sci. Transl. Med. 6, 257re7 (2014).

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