Category: Brain

Categories
BCI Brain

fNIRS headband measures boredom, fatigue, focus in air traffic control simulation

Tufts paper | Boston Globe

Tufts professors Robert Jacob and Sergio Fantini are developing an fNIRS based headband to read brain activity, enabling a computer to determine whether the wearer is bored, fatigued, or sharp.  They recently tested the method in an air traffic control simulation.

With functional near infrared spectroscopy, a row of lights embedded in the headband beams light waves through the skull and onto the prefrontal cortex of the brain.  A computer connected to the headband can gauge the person’s level of mental exertion by measuring the amount of light absorbed by the brain.

ApplySci questions the safety of continuous infrared spectroscopy, and looks forward to less invasive methods of monitoring focus in air traffic controllers, pilots, and other attention-critical roles.

Categories
BCI Brain Monitoring Seniors Sensors Wearables

Facial expression controlled ear computer/health monitor

AFP | Japan Times

Kazuhiro Taniguchi of Hiroshima City University has developed a 17 gram “Earclip-type Wearable PC”  equipped with a GPS, compass, gyrosensor, battery, barometer, speaker and microphone.  A microchip and data storage enable users to load software.   The device is being tested now, with promising applications for the elderly and disabled.

The system can be connected to a smartphone and allow the user to navigate through software programs using facial expressions, such as a raised eyebrow, a stuck-out tongue, a wiggle of the nose or by clenching teeth.

The device uses infrared sensors that monitor tiny movements in the ear, which differ depending on how the eyes and mouth move. Because the user does not have to move either hand, its developers say it can serve as “a third hand” caregivers, rock-climbers, motorcyclists, astronauts, and people with disabilities.

The earpiece could also function as a hearing aid,  and could monitor the wearer’s health, including pulse and body temperature, while logging how often they eat and sneeze.  An accelerometer could tell when the user falls and instruct the smartphone to notify relatives, or call an ambulance based on GPS data.

Categories
BCI Brain

Brain-Kinect Interface for rehabilitation

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-658-02897-8_18

John Edison Muñoz Cardona, a Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira student, has developed a Brain-Kinect Interface for rehabilitation.  It combines bio-mechanical signals acquired by the Kinect sensor with signals from the Emotiv EPOC headset.

The combination of motion capture signals and EEG-based BCI is used for interaction in a rehabilitation game for patients with motor and/or cognitive impairments. The system provides a long and fluid interaction time, enabling effective data collection.  Software is used to objectively describe body movements

The  “Interactive Room for Rehabilitation” is both a real and digital space where patients with neuromotor impairment can interact through movement and thought, allowing motor and cognitive assessment.

Categories
Brain

Optogenetics for pain control

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/biox-numb-pain-021914.html

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.2834.html

Stanford professor Scott Delp is exploring the use of optogenetics for pain control.  He is experimenting with mice with the hope that this research could be used to understand and treat pain in humans.  The optogenetics process is invasive, and therefore not suitable for all.

The mice are modified with gene therapy to have pain-sensing nerves that can be controlled by light. One color of light makes the mice more sensitive to pain. Another reduces pain. The scientists shone a light on the paws of mice through the Plexiglas bottom of the cage.

Increasing or decreasing the sensation of pain in these mice could help scientists understand why pain seems to continue in people after an injury has healed. The researchers hope to learn if persistent pain change nerves, and if so, how they can be changed back to a state where they stop sending pain messages to the brain.

Categories
BCI Brain Prosthetics

Cortical-spinal prosthesis directs “targeted movement” in paralyzed limbs

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140218/ncomms4237/full/ncomms4237.html

Cornell‘s Maryam Shanechi, Harvard‘s Ziv Williams and colleagues developed a cortical-spinal prosthesis that directs “targeted movement” in paralyzed limbs. They tested a prosthesis that connects two subjects by enabling one subject to send its recorded neural activity to control limb movements in a different subject that is temporarily sedated.

The BMI is based on a set of real-time decoding algorithms that process neural signals by predicting their targeted movements. In the experiment, one animal acted as the controller of the movement or the “master,” then “decided” which target location to move to, and generated the neural activity that was decoded into this intended movement. The decoded movement was used to directly control the limb of the other animal by electrically stimulating its spinal cord.

The researchers focused on decoding the target endpoint of the movement as opposed to its detailed kinematics. This allowed them to match the decoded target with a set of spinal stimulation parameters that generated limb movement toward that target. They demonstrated that the alert animal could produce two-dimensional movement in the sedated animal’s limb .

The experiment focused on two different animals, rather than just one with a temporarily paralyzed limb. The scientists contend that this provided a true model of paralysis, since the master animal’s brain and the sedated animal’s limb had no physiological connection, as is the case for a paralyzed patient.

Categories
BCI Brain

Pentagon considers electric brain stimulation for troops

Boston Globe article

APA paper

The US Air Force has completed 5 studies to investigate if low level electrical stimulation can replace caffeine for fatigued troops who oversee the processing of digital information, including surveillance and drone footage.

The research grew out of a recognition that while computers have automated many military functions, humans are increasingly needed to monitor massive amounts of information to make battlefield decisions.  It is led by R. Andy McKinley at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

The process relies on controlled doses of electrical current, passed into certain regions of the brain to cause, in effect, a minor seizure, or more rapid nerve impulses.  There have been side effects, including skin irritation from the electrodes and headaches.

“The hard part is to know what to turn on and what to turn off,” said Harvard professor William “Scott” Killgore, who is involved in a separate Pentagon study to help determine which parts of the brain are most effective to stimulate.

The two  techniques being studied  are transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation.  It is described as one of the most in-depth studies of electric stimulation on healthy individuals.

Categories
Brain Eyes

Perceptual learning training improves vision

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S0960982214000050

Professor Aaron Seitz, Professor Daniel Ozer , and Jenni Deveau at UC Riverside combined perceptual learning approaches to determine if improvements gained from an integrated, perceptual learning based training program would transfer to real world tasks. They found that  the brain-training technique significantly improved the vision of baseball players.

Before the start of the 2013 NCAA Division 1 baseball season, 19 baseball players completed thirty 25 minute sessions of a vision training video game.  18 team members received no training.  Players who participated in the training saw a 31 percent improvement in visual acuity — some gaining as much as two lines on the Snellen eye chart — and greater sensitivity to contrasts in light.  The researchers claim that the trained players had 4.4 percent fewer strikeouts and scored 41 more runs during the season.

Categories
Brain Cancer

Study: Nanofibers partially “move” brain tumors to accessible locations

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat3878.html

http://www.research.gatech.edu/news/researchers-hijack-cancer-migration-mechanism-“move”-brain-tumors

Glioblastoma cancers are difficult to treat because malignant cells spread through the brain by following nerve fibers and blood vessels to invade new locations.  Professor Ravi Bellamkonda and Georgia Tech and Emory colleagues developed a technique they claim hijacks this migratory mechanism, turning it against the cancer by using a film of thin nanofibers to lure tumor cells away.

Instead of invading new areas, the migrating cells latch onto the specially-designed nanofibers and follow them to a location – potentially outside the brain – where they can be captured and killed. Researchers claim that they can partially move tumors from inoperable locations to more accessible ones. The technique reduced the size of brain tumors in animal models, suggesting that this form of brain cancer might one day be treated more like a chronic disease.

Categories
Brain Cancer Eyes

Cancer cells glow when viewed through surgical glasses

https://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/26496.aspx

Washington University Professor Samuel Achilefu has developed surgical glasses that detect tumors by making cancer cells glow and appear blue in color.  This is accomplished through custom video technology, a head mounted display, and a targeted molecular agent that attaches to cancer cells.  Tumors as small as 1 mm in diameter could be detected.  The glasses are designed to enable surgeons to distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells, helping to ensure that no stray tumor cells are left behind during surgery.

Categories
BCI Brain Signal Processing

Wirelessly charged cochlear implant with no external hardware

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/cochlear-implants-with-no-exterior-hardware-0209.html

MIT scientists have developed a low power signal processing chip that could lead to a cochlear implant requiring no external hardware.  Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary doctors collaborated with the researchers.  The implant would be wirelessly recharged and run for eight hours.

Instead of an external microphone,  the implant would use the natural microphone of the middle ear, which is almost always intact in cochlear implant patients.

The design exploits the mechanism of a middle ear implant. Middle ear ossicles convey the vibrations of the eardrum to the cochlea, which converts acoustic signals to electrical signals. In patients with middle ear implants, the cochlea is functional, but the stapes ossicle doesn’t vibrate with enough force to stimulate the auditory nerve. A middle ear implant consists of a tiny sensor that detects the ossicles’ vibrations and an actuator that helps drive the stapes.

The new device would use the same type of sensor, but the signal it generates would travel to a microchip implanted in the ear, which would convert it to an electrical signal and pass it to an electrode in the cochlea. Lowering the power requirements of the converter chip was the key to eliminating the skull mounted hardware.

Categories
Brain fMRI Neural Computation

Computational modeling and fMRI show the roles of brain regions in behavioral control

https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(13)01125-2

John O’Doherty of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center has pinpointed areas of the brain—the inferior lateral prefrontal cortex and frontopolar cortex—that seem to serve as the “arbitrator” between model-based and model-free decision-making systems, weighing the reliability of the predictions each makes and then allocating control accordingly.  Professor O’Doherty believes that this can lead to better treatments for brain disorders, such as drug addiction, and psychiatric disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. These disorders, which involve repetitive behaviors, may be driven in part by malfunctions in the degree to which behavior is controlled by the habitual system versus the goal-directed system.

Categories
Assistive Technologies Brain Heart Stroke

Non-invasive, nanoparticle method for identifying atherosclerosis plaques

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl404816m

Case Western‘s Michael Bruckman and colleagues have developed a multifunctional nanoparticle that pinpoints blood vessel plaques caused by atherosclerosis using MRI.  The goal is to create a non-invasive method of identifying heart attack and stroke causing plaques vulnerable to rupture, in time for treatment.

Currently doctors can only identify narrowing blood vessels caused by plaque accumulation via incision and the insertion of a catheter inside a blood vessel in the arm, groin or neck. The catheter emits a dye that enables X-rays to show the narrowing.

The researchers found that a nanoparticle built from a rod-shaped virus, commonly found on tobacco, locates and illuminates plaque in arteries more effectively, with a fraction of the dye.  The tailored nanoparticles target plaque biomarkers, opening the possibility that particles can be programmed to identify vulnerable plaques from stable.  Untargeted dyes alone cannot accomplish this.