Quick Summary
- Recruiting people whose speech is limited by neurological injury or disease
- The implants, instead of being stimulative, will "listen" as people try to speak
- Sophisticated algorithms would turn signals into computer-generated speech
新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis Health is recruiting people for a clinical trial with the goal of building a 鈥渘eurological prosthesis鈥 for restoring speech to people who have lost 鈥 or are losing 鈥 the ability to speak. The research is aimed at people who have neurological injuries or progressive neurological diseases, such as spinal cord injury, stroke and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
With this study, 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis joins , an ambitious consortium of universities and academic medical centers studying how brain-computer interfaces can be used to restore neurological function in people living with paralysis. The technology is also sometimes referred to as brain-machine interface or neuroprosthesis.
The focus of BrainGate is to use this technology to 鈥渢urn thoughts into action鈥 for people living with paralysis. Some of the consortium鈥檚 studies have turned 鈥 into text output to a computer and helped participants with paralysis .
The researchers at 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis are focused on a condition known as , where people want to speak but are unable to control their vocal cords or mouth in a way that would produce audible speech.
鈥淟osing the ability to speak is devastating,鈥 said assistant professor in the , co-director of the and the site-responsible investigator for the study. 鈥淭he existing assistive communication technologies available to people living with paralysis, such as eye trackers and sip-and-puff devices, are slow, cumbersome, and require substantial effort from both the user and their caretaker.鈥
Brandman, who will lead the surgeries for the study, added: 鈥淚t鈥檚 my hope that brain-computer interface technology will one day restore functional independence for people living with paralysis."
鈥楻别补诲颈苍驳鈥 brain signals
With some diseases and injuries, the areas of the brain responsible for language and wanting to speak are intact, but the signals cannot get through to the nerves and muscles that need to receive command impulses to produce sound.
With this new study, the researchers hope to 鈥渞ead鈥 the brain signals meant to move the muscles involved in speaking 鈥 the tongue, jaw, lips, voice box and diaphragm 鈥 and translate the person鈥檚 intention to speak into comprehensible speech produced by a computer.
The researchers explain that the technology cannot read minds or detect inner monologue and thoughts. The investigational technology is being developed only to communicate the signals generated in the brain as part of intentional speech.
鈥淏y implanting electrodes that can record from individual brain cells involved in generating speech, we hope we can enable the participants to communicate by just trying to speak,鈥 said neuroscientist and neuroengineer , scientific lead for the study. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery and co-director with Brandman of the Neuroprosthetics Lab.
鈥淭here are many open questions,鈥 Stavisky said. 鈥淲e hope to learn what brain cells do when a person tries to speak. For example, what kind of information does this brain activity contain? How does that relate to the movements or sounds the person is trying to produce? With this study, we anticipate we will be able to answer those and many other questions.鈥
Technology is evolving
Implants have been used in the brain to help with disease symptoms for decades. Hundreds of thousands of people globally have been implanted with devices. The technology is routinely applied to help people with Parkinson鈥檚 disease, tremor and epilepsy. In deep brain stimulation, implants that generate electric impulses are used to manage symptoms of neurological diseases.
What is different about the BrainGate2 clinical trial is that the implants are not there to stimulate the nerve cells. Instead, they are there to 鈥渓isten鈥 to them.
Participants accepted into the study will have tiny, specialized devices known as Utah Arrays implanted in the region of their brain that generates speech. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has provided permission for testing the devices in clinical trials.
The arrays obtain impulses from the nerve cells 鈥 neural recordings 鈥 that are conveyed to two small metal pedestals on top of the head. The pedestals are about a half-inch in diameter. From there, the signals can be connected to a computer.
To turn the signals from nerve cells into the intended speech, the researchers will rely on advanced machine-learning techniques to create sophisticated computer algorithms. They anticipate these algorithms will be able to decode the neural patterns into speech accurately. The computer-decoded speech can then be paired with text-generating or synthetic speech-generating devices.
Stavisky noted that research groups are testing and improving these advanced medical devices that can potentially apply the recent progress in computing and neuroscience to provide new ways to treat paralysis.
鈥淚t is an exciting time,鈥 he said. 鈥淲e still have much to learn, and there are no guarantees this will work. Based on how this field has been progressing and the strength of our interdisciplinary research team, I am hopeful that we can quickly make substantial progress towards restoring the ability for people who have lost the ability to speak to have naturalistic, real-time conversations.鈥
, director of the BrainGate consortium and clinical trial, said, 鈥淚鈥檓 thrilled to welcome David, Sergey and the wonderful neuroengineering community at 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis to the BrainGate clinical trials. Their scientific and clinical insights will undoubtedly lead to breakthroughs toward the restoration of communication.鈥 Hochberg is a neurointensivist at , a faculty member at Brown University and Harvard Medical School, and director of the in the Providence VA Health System.
ELIGIBILITY
To be eligible, participants should:
- Be over 18 and live within three hours of the greater Sacramento area
- Have paralysis in the arms and the legs or have difficulty speaking
- Have a medical diagnosis such as spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, ALS or other degenerative motor neuron disorder
Media Resources
Media Contact
- Lisa Howard, 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis Health Public Affairs, 916-752-6394 or lehoward@ucdavis.edu.