Thursday, June 15, 2017

New Method Reaches Deep in the Brain Without Surgery

I would think there could be some usefulness for stroke somewhere in here.
https://danablog.org/2017/06/09/new-method-reaches-deep-in-the-brain-without-surgery/
A team of neuroscientists and engineers are working to develop a new form of treatment for people who have Parkinson’s disease, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. According to a recent New York Times article, the available methods for treating these conditions currently involve the risks of surgery and can have limited ability with directing electrical pulses to the right areas of the brain.
Dana Alliance member Helen Mayberg, tells the Times:
They have this clever new way to deliver current[s] to a spot of interest deep in the brain and do it without invading the brain…If you didn’t have to actually open up somebody’s brain and put something in it, if it could do what we’re doing now just as well—sign me up.
So far the research has only been conducted in mice, but experts are hoping the technique will work for people, too. “This is something that many of us in the field have wished for for a long time,” says Alexander Rotenberg. Rotenberg is director of the neuromodulation program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The article goes on to explain the details of the non-invasive treatment:
The method, called temporal interference, involves beaming different electric frequencies, too high for neurons to respond to, from electrodes on the skull’s surface. The team found that where the currents intersected inside the brain, the frequencies interfered with each other, essentially canceling out all but the difference between them and leaving a low-frequency current that neurons in that location responded to.
For more information on the experimental study, read the full article here.
– Seimi Rurup

Research paper is here:

Noninvasive Deep Brain Stimulation via Temporally Interfering Electric Fields 

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