Now all we need is for our stroke medical leadership to do the following:
1. Describe the problem exactly How and why does a neuron drop its' current task and take up a neighbors? Neuroplasticity in action?
2. Write an RFP to researchers to solve that problem.
3. Fund them with foundation grants.
4. Write stroke rehab protocols based on the research.
5. Get the Nobel prize in medicine
Researchers
at Purdue University are developing chips that could help scientists
understand nerve conditions, and potentially help lay the foundations
for neuroprosthetics.
The Google subsidiary has struck a series of deals with organisations in the UK health service -- so what's really happening?
You don't need to be a research scientist to know that
the human brain is a sensitive organ: each square millimetre of the
brain contains tens of thousands of neurons -- the electrical wiring
that communicates messages around the brain.
While measuring the
electrical activity of those neurones with external probes or implants
can give researchers and medical professionals an insight into the
brain's functioning, introducing external hardware to the brain is not
without risk.
Brain implants need to be as small as possible to
reduce the chance that they could disrupt the brain's functioning. But,
thanks to the density of those tightly packed neurons, any chip used to
monitor a human brain must be capable of obtaining and processing huge
amounts of information.
Tiny, low-power, high-throughput chips
that can sit comfortably on the human brain: not exactly the easiest
hardware to build, but chips that can do all these things is vital to
further research into brain and central nervous system disorders.
By
making a chip that can gather information about the workings of the
brain, without disturbing or harming the sensitive structures within,
researchers at
Purdue University, in Indiana are hoping to create a tool that can provide better support to people with neurological disorders.
The
researchers have created a tiny chip that picks up signals from the
brain or the nervous system, and sends them wirelessly outside the body
for analysis, without the need for a battery, according to the
university.
Creating the chip was the work of three years, Saeed
Mohammadi, an associate professor in Purdue's School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering department, told ZDNet.
"The idea was 'can we
make this as small as possible?' So we looked at what are the possible
ways to make the system small -- it shouldn't have a battery, it
shouldn't have any external components, it should just be a small chip,
and everything should be on a small chip. So, we worked hard to
integrate the antenna on it, we worked hard to replace the battery with
wireless power," he said.
In order to keep the chip as small as
possible (it's now in the region of 1mm by 0.5mm), the researchers took
to redesigning its antenna in a spiral pattern -- a decision that
allowed them to keep the antenna as long as possible while still
shrinking the volume of space needed to contain it.
"Usually
antennas are large, especially as this is a low-frequency [one] at 1Ghz,
and when you calculate the size of the antenna, it should be several
centimetres... Part of it we spiralled around itself to make it small,
while the main part, which is responsible for detecting the majority of
the signal, is straight. By doing this trick, we were able to make the
antenna small and still very efficient," Mohammadi said.
Currently,
Purdue's prototype chip has four channels -- a small fraction of what
would be needed for a commercial neural probe, but enough to prove the
system could be used.
"We have to add a lot more neural sites to
be able to take out many, many more neural signals. Right now, the chip
only has four or them, but we need a lot more -- people use probes that
have 64 or 128 channels to look at different sites. We're working on
expanding the numbers, so we're hoping to be able to add more of these
neural sites, and that makes the device a little bit larger," Mohammadi
said. Expanding the chip to 64 channels should take another year, he
added.
The researchers will also be working on other improvements,
such as boosting the speed of the interface circuit that digitises the
signal from the neural site without significantly increasing the chip's
overall power requirement at the same time. Similarly, as the number of
neural sites the chip can read grows, the Purdue researchers are
planning to increase the speed of wireless communication between the
chip and the external computer that receives the data.
Those
aren't the only balancing acts the team will need to pull off before
their brain-reading implants can be used on humans. One of the
difficulties of making electronics that can interface with brains is
accommodating the movement of the organ. Like most non-bony structures
in the body, the brain isn't static: it pulsates, so any electronics
that touch must have a degree of flexibility to move alongside.
"If
this doesn't move with the brain's movement, it could injure the
neurons. Over time, people who have used these probes have noticed the
signal is lost... if your electrode is flexible and can move with the
brain tissue, you'll have less injury and a better chance of getting a
signal over a long time," Mohammedi said.
While the Purdue
researchers have typically used their chip for only minutes at a time,
they've designed it to be flexible enough, and low powered enough, that
it could potentially stay in the body for a longer period, and
ultimately see later generations of the chip used in the long-term
monitoring of brain health.
The dinky chip has its origins in
hardware intended to monitor soil conditions, such as temperature and
humidity, according to Mohammedi. "The idea was to have a piece of dust
that could, if you put it inside the soil, detect the nitrate or nitrite
level, or the nutrition of the soil, and monitor the growth condition
of the plant. This would be useful for agriculture. We had some work in
that area, and it was not too hard to attach the neural sensor to this
device to do essentially the same thing."
In the shorter term, the
chip is likely to be used in monitoring neurodegenerative diseases such
as Parkinson's or ALS in animal models to help better understand and
research the conditions.
In the more distant future, however, the
chip could help repair nerve injuries by acting as a bridge between two
parts of a nerve that have become severed. "If someone has a nerve
injury you could put two of these devices on each and reconnect them
with wireless communication," Mohammadi said. It could also be used to
connect the brain and other parts of the nervous system, underpinning
neuroprosthetics. "That would be 20 years down the road, there's a long
way to go."
