Madrid
Updated:
Keep
A person with andamyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) who has total paralysis, unable to speak, has managed to communicate thanks to a brain implant.
This has been achieved by a team of researchers from the Wyss Center for Bioengineering and Neuroengineering in Geneva (Switzerland), in collaboration with the University of Tübingen (Germany), who have implemented a brain-computer interface (BCI).
The study of this unique clinical case has been developed for more than two years and is published today in “Nature Communications”.
ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease in which people lose the ability to move and speak.
It is not the first time that such hopeful results have been achieved for people who are prisoners in their own body.
In 2016, Hanneke Bruijne, a Dutch doctor with ALS, volunteered for a study that made her the first person able to break her isolation and communicate in full sentences thanks to a brain implant that allowed a computer to decode her thoughts and translate them to a computer screen.
This was the first fully implanted brain-computer interface system that anyone has used in their daily lives with any success. His case was published in “The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Globally, the number of people with ALS is increasing and more than 300,000 people are projected to be living with the disease by 2040.and many of them will reach a state where it is no longer possible to speak.
The authors of this new study believe that with further development, the approach described in this study could enable more people with advanced ALS to maintain communication.
“This work answers a question about whether people with complete locked-in syndrome, who have lost all voluntary muscle control, including eye or mouth movement, also lose their brain’s ability to generate commands for communication.” , points Jonas Zimmermanna neuroscientist at the Wyss Center in Geneva.
According to some studies, these people who are prisoners of their own body, but with their cognitive abilities intact, report a good quality of life if they manage to have a certain ability to communicate.
These types of devices, known as brain-computer interfaces, have been used to enable quadriplegic people to move. But, the authors of this finding point out, “to our knowledge, ours is the first study to achieve communication from someone who has no remaining voluntary movement and therefore for whom the interface is now the only means of communication.” .
The patient is a man in his 30s who was diagnosed with a rapidly progressing form of ALS. He has two sets of intracortical microelectrodes surgically implanted in his motor cortex.
Thanks to the implant, the patient, who lives at home with his family, has learned to generate brain activity by trying different movements.
These brain signals, explains the article in “Nature Communications”, are picked up by the implanted microelectrodes and are decoded by a machine learning model in real time.
This model maps the signals to mean ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And to reveal what the participant wants to communicate, a spelling program reads the letters of the alphabet out loud. Using a neurofeeback or auditory feedback system, the participant can choose ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to confirm or reject the letter, thus forming complete words and sentences.
“This study has also shown that, with the involvement of family or caregivers, the system can, in principle, be used in the home,” says Wyss Center CTO, George Kouvasfor whom this is an “important step for people living with ALS who are being cared for outside the hospital setting.”
We are, he said, before a “technology, which benefits a patient and their family in their own environment, and which is a great example of how technological advances in the field of BCI can be translated to create a direct impact”.
The team is also working on ABILITY, a wireless implantable BCI device designed to flexibly connect to microelectrode arrays or ECoG electrode grids. This will allow detection and processing of signals from very specific or larger areas of the brain. The approach could allow speech to be decoded directly from the brain during imagined speech, leading to more natural communication.
However, the researchers caution, the system used in this study is not available outside of clinical research investigations.
See them
comments