On January 31, it was reported that a few days ago, the team of Xuanwu Hospital and Tsinghua University jointly announced that a major breakthrough in brain-computer interface technology had been made.
According to the official accounts of "Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University" and "Tsinghua University", the team of Professor Zhao Guoguang of Xuanwu Hospital of Capital Medical University and the team of Professor Hong Bo of Tsinghua University School of Medicine recently held a summary meeting of the progress of the clinical trial stage of wireless minimally invasive brain-computer interface, announcing that the first patient has made a breakthrough in the rehabilitation of brain-computer interface.
Brain-computer interfaces enable direct communication between the brain and the computer by recording and interpreting brain signals. On the one hand, it can help patients with ALS, spinal cord injury, epilepsy and other brain diseases to recover, and on the other hand, it is expected to realize brain-computer integration intelligence and directly expand the information processing ability of the human brain. On October 24, 2023, Professor Hong Bo of Tsinghua University School of Medicine led the team to design and develop the wireless minimally invasive implantable brain-computer interface NEO (Neural Electronic Opportunity), and successfully conducted the first clinical implantation trial in Xuanwu Hospital. President Zhao Guoguang and Director Shan Yongzhi of Xuanwu Hospital presided over the surgical planning and implantation surgery. On January 29, the joint team held a summary meeting of the clinical trial phase and announced that the first patient had made a breakthrough in the rehabilitation of brain-computer interface.
Wireless Minimally Invasive Implantation of Brain-Computer Interface NEO System and Its In Vivo Machine (Design and Synthesis Hong Bo, School of Medicine)
Two coin-sized brain-computer interface processors were implanted into the skulls of high paraplegic patients to successfully collect nerve signals in sensorimotor brain regions. The first patient was a complete spinal cord injury (ASIA score A) of the cervical spine caused by a car accident and had been in quadriplegia for 14 years. The system adopts a wireless minimally invasive design, the internal organ is embedded in the skull, and the electrodes are covered by the epidura (the dura is located between the skull and the cerebral cortex, which plays a role in protecting the nerve tissue), and does not damage the brain cells, and the patient is discharged home 10 days after the operation. When used at home, the external computer supplies power to the internal computer through the scalp, and receives the nerve signals in the brain, transmits them to the computer or mobile phone, and realizes brain-computer interface communication with the help of decoding algorithms. The system uses near-field wireless power and communication technology, and the internal machine implanted in the skull does not require batteries, and the patient can use it for a lifetime. After three months of home brain-computer interface rehabilitation training, the patient can drive pneumatic gloves through EEG activities to achieve brain control functions such as drinking water independently, and the grasp and decoding accuracy rate is more than 90%, and the ASIA clinical score and sensory evoked potential response of the patients with spinal cord injury have been significantly improved.
The team of President Zhao Guoguang of Xuanwu Hospital performed the first implant surgery (Photo by Liu Dingkun, School of Medicine)
The first patient successfully achieved brain control and grasp through wireless minimally invasive brain-computer interface (Lin Yujing, School of Photography and Journalism)
Unlike the Neuralink brain-computer interface led by Elon Musk, the wireless minimally invasive implantable brain-computer interface NEO places electrodes on the brain's epidural, which has been developed through long-term animal experiments and will not damage nerve tissue. The software and hardware of the NEO system for clinical application were developed by the team of Professor Hong Bo of Tsinghua University School of Medicine in cooperation with Boruikang Technology, and the clinical cooperation units include Xuanwu Hospital and Tiantan Hospital. It is understood that the implantation of the second patient with spinal cord injury has been successfully carried out in Tiantan Hospital on December 19, 2023. The clinical trial of the wireless minimally invasive brain-computer interface passed the ethics review of Xuanwu Hospital and Tiantan Hospital in April and May 2023, respectively, and carried out international and domestic clinical trial registration of implantable medical devices (NCT05920174, Shanghai Machinery Clinical 20230175). According to public information reports, the first clinical implantation of the brain-computer interface of the Neuralink team was carried out on January 28, 2024, and the patient is recovering, and the preliminary results show that the nerve discharge signal is normal.
The brain-computer interface research team of Tsinghua School of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering has been conducting long-term research on the principles, algorithms and clinical translations of brain-computer interfaces. In 2015, the team of Prof. Gao Xiaorong and Prof. Gao Shangkai reached an information transmission rate of 319 bits/minute in the brain-computer interface of the scalp EEG evoked potential, and in 2021, the equivalent information transmission rate of each electrode reached 20 bits/min in the preclinical study of wireless minimally invasive brain-computer interface, which exceeded the highest level of similar brain-computer interfaces in the world at that time.
Source | Network integration
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