Aivoimplantit sekä muut sellaiset

[BlackFox]

Hänelle tehdään ensimmäinen päänsiirto

Maanantai 15.8.2016 klo 19.23



Valery Spiridonov on ilmoittautunut vapaaehtoiseksi maailman ensimmäiseen päänsiirtoon. (AOP)
Valery Spiridonov, 31, on venäläinen insinööri, joka kärsii harvinaisesta Werdnig-Hoffman-taudista. Se on selkäydinperäinen lihassurkastuma. Tauti on parantumaton ja johtaa kuolemaan.

Spiridonov on ilmoittautunut vapaaehtoiseksi italialaisen neurokirurgin Sergio Canaveron ensi vuoden tammikuulle suunnittelemaan leikkaukseen.

Leikkauksessa Spiridonovin pää irrotetaan ja kiinnitetään aivokuolleen, mutta muuten terveen luovuttajan vartaloon.


Spiridonov kärsii kuolemaan johtavasta harvinaisesta lihassurkastumasta. (AOP)
Leikkaus kestää kaksi päivää

Canaveroa on arvosteltu siitä, että hän aikoo tehdä leikkauksen, joka on taatusti vaarallinen ja monen mielestä siihen liittyy suuria eettisiä ongelmia.

Moni asia voi mennä pieleen. Suurimpana haasteena pidetään selkäytimien liittämistä toisiinsa.

Canavero kertoi tulevasta leikkauksesta tiedotustilaisuudessa Moskovassa. Leikkaus tulee hänen mukaansa kestämään kaksi päivää.

Ensin Spiridonovin pää jäädytetään -15 asteeseen. Sen jälkeen sekä potilaan että luovuttajan päät irrotetaan ja potilaan pää kiinnitetään luovuttajan vartaloon.

Lihakset, verisuonet ja hermoradat liitetään yhteen. Sen jälkeen Spiridonov vaivutetaan koomaan noin kuukaudeksi, jotta hän ei liikkuisi ja parantuminen pääsisi vauhtiin.

Canavero uskoo Science Channelin mukaan, että potilas voisi oppia kävelemään noin vuoden kuluttua leikkauksesta. Kirurgi kertoo, että potilas kykenisi kuitenkin puhumaan omalla äänellään välittömästi koomasta herättyään.

 

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Photo: Lieber Group/Harvard University

The mouse, which was free to roam across its environment, is shown with a voltage amplifier attached near its head. A flexible serial peripheral interface cable was used to transmit the amplified signals to the researchers' data acquisition systems.

Want to understand what happens to the brain as it ages, or figure out how people learn to recognize faces? Neurologists asking such questions, or struggling to deal with brain degeneration caused by Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, might get some insight from detailed observations of the brain’s circuitry over time. But so far, such information has been hard to come by.

Now researchers at Harvard have shown that they can track brain activity, at the level of individual neurons, for months at a time, using a tiny electronic mesh that can be injected directly into the brain. A group led by Charles Lieber, a chemistry professor at Harvard, reports in this week’s Nature Methods that they were able to record the neural activity of mice over eight months, long enough to see how the animals’ brains changed as they entered the mouse version of middle age.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-...ble-nanowires-monitor-mouse-brains-for-months

Lieber’s hope is that, if scientists can identify what goes wrong in the brain’s circuitry—leading to, say, Parkinson’s—at an early stage, they could use some sort of stimulation to alter or at least slow the process.

Statistical analysis of the signals they recorded showed that they were picking up activity from individual neurons, and that they could follow the same neurons over time. This ability could provide neurologists with a detailed map of what’s going on in, say, the visual cortex during learning, or let them watch the process by which memories are formed and how that process degrades with age.

Lieber would also like to use the devices in other parts of the nervous system. A mesh over the retina might yield some information about what’s happening in the eye and how that ties into what the neurons are doing. A set of electrodes in the spinal cord might provide new information, or even a new form of therapy, in cases of traumatic injury.

 

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cyberjalka .... hmmmm

 

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It does not take an infinite number of monkeys to type a passage of Shakespeare. Instead, it takes a single monkey equipped with brain-sensing technology - and a cheat sheet.

That technology, developed by Stanford Bio-X scientists Krishna Shenoy, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, and postdoctoral fellow Paul Nuyujukian, directly reads brain signals to drive a cursor moving over a keyboard. In an experiment conducted with monkeys, the animals were able to transcribe passages from the New York Times and Hamlet at a rate of up to 12 words per minute.

Earlier versions of the technology have already been tested successfully in people with paralysis, but the typing was slow and imprecise. This latest work tests improvements to the speed and accuracy of the technology that interprets brain signals and drives the cursor.

"Our results demonstrate that this interface may have great promise for use in people," said Nuyujukian, who will join Stanford faculty as an assistant professor of bioengineering in 2017. "It enables a typing rate sufficient for a meaningful conversation."

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/B...allows_typing_at_12_words_per_minute_999.html

 

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last year, O’Connell-Ponkos tried a prosthetic arm enhanced with an new control system that can recognize subtle nerve signals, built by Chicago-based engineering company Coapt. Unlike the prosthesis she used as a teenager, the new arm allowed her to move more naturally, even gracefully. Today, the outgoing horse trainer wears the prosthesis constantly, relying on it for everything from chopping wood to putting her hair in a ponytail.

This recent advance to a natural, intuitive control system for upper-limb prosthetics is notable, if largely overlooked. At this year’s American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association conference in Boston, I had to search for Coapt’s small booth, tucked away in the exhibit hall behind rows of splashy orthotics and leg prosthetics. There, O’Connell-Ponkos, now a paid spokesperson for Coapt, was promoting the technology, which is compatible with the five major prosthetic manufacturers.

Coapt hit the market in late 2013, and an estimated 200 individuals today use the system, says company co-founder and CEO Blair Lock. The system, encased in a small black box, consists of a circuit board and set of algorithms that use pattern recognition to decode electric signals from arm muscles, working as a bridge between the user’s thoughts and the prosthesis.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/bionics/thoughtcontrol-systems-advance-bionic-arms

For now, the limiting factor isn’t the technology of the arm—the MPL, for example, has 26 joints and a couple hundred sensors—but the bandwidth required to decipher signals from the brain. “If you move your arm, there are probably 500 million neurons involved. Right now, the best we can do is see a few hundred of those neurons,” says McLaughlin. “We have all this stuff going on in our heads, and we have very limited capability of observing it.”

The future of prosthetic control hopes to tap into the brain’s symphony directly, by implanting electrodes under the skin or even directly into the brain. The Hopkins’ MPL team, in conjunction with the University of Pittsburg, recently tested brain electrode implants in two patients with severe spinal cord injuries. Ideally, the technology will someday be non-invasive, says McLaughlin, “but we’re still not there yet. Give us another year or so.

 

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Inside the brain, many neurons fire so that the body will perform a single action. Unfortunately for amputees, this brain activity is usually for naught. But researchers have been working on improving connections between the brain and artificial limbs so that when neurons fire, manmade arms and legs can move. Now, engineers at the University of Southampton say they’ve shown that low-power devices known as memristors might be more energy efficient than today’s experimental neural interfaces that help relay signals from the brain to prosthetic limbs.

Themis Prodromakis, who studies nanoelectronics at the University of Southampton, in England, is exploring one of the building blocks of brain and computer interfaces for medical applications. His early research supports the development of special neuronal brain-chips: neural implants that communicate with prosthetic limbs when neurons fire.

Monitoring thousands of recording sites in the brain and transmitting all that data is a very difficult problem, he says. He told IEEE Spectrum that adding memristors to a system with integrated circuits could allow researchers to monitor activity “from potentially millions of neurons.”

Memristors, the fourth type of basic electronic device—along with resistors, capacitors, and inductors—are special because they have a memory. When current flows, their resistance changes, but the changes remain even after the current is shut off. There’s a scientific movement aimed at using memristors to mimic how the brain learns and processes information.

In the new research, described in a paper published in Nature Communications on 26 September, Prodromakis and his team used memristors for another purpose: recording neuron activity. Recording neuron activity isn’t a new concept; an approach in 2005, for example, used CMOS devices. But it required offline data processing.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-...wer-neuron-activity-detection-with-memristors

The ultimate goal, Prodomakis, says, is that the low-power memristors would be hooked up with other devices as an implant to control prosthetic limbs. The next step, he says, is to classify the neuronal activity into different categories.

“This technology is very interesting as a processing tool,” says Max Catalan, a biomedical engineer at the Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden. “However, the real clinical application is not very clear or straightforward.”

Catalan, who was not involved in the study, works on creating implants for controlling artificial limbs. He notes that the “real bottleneck” in the research field is not processing signals, but finding a way to interface between the brain and prosthetics with long-term stability and high resolution.

“Generally speaking, brain-machine interfaces would benefit from
miniaturization and low-power computational systems,” says Paul Nuyujukian, an engineer at Stanford University who works on brain-computer interfaces for prosthetics. Nuyujukian, who was also not involved in the study, added that, “Work towards that goal is, of course, encouraging to see.”

 

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US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance mental skills of staff, in research that aims to boost the performance of air crews, drone operators and others in the armed forces’ most demanding roles.


The successful tests of the devices pave the way for servicemen and women to be wired up at critical times of duty, so that electrical pulses can be beamed into their brains to improve their effectiveness in high pressure situations.

The brain stimulation kits use five electrodes to send weak electric currents through the skull and into specific parts of the cortex. Previous studies have found evidence that by helping neurons to fire, these minor brain zaps can boost cognitive ability.

The technology is seen as a safer alternative to prescription drugs, such as modafinil and ritalin, both of which have been used off-label as performance enhancing drugs in the armed forces.

But while electrical brain stimulation appears to have no harmful side effects, some experts say its long-term safety is unknown, and raise concerns about staff being forced to use the equipment if it is approved for military operations

https://www.theguardian.com/science...cal-brain-stimulation-to-enhance-staff-skills

 

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Not content to reach for Mars and dethrone fossil fuels, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Tuesday is turning his focus to delving into people's minds.

In a message fired off Tuesday on Twitter, Musk appeared to confirm he is creating a startup called Neuralink devoted to enabling brains to interface directly with computers, accessing processing power and perhaps even downloading memories for storage.

"Long Neuralink piece coming out on (blog platform) @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to," Musk tweeted.

The Twitter post by the founder of electric carmaker Tesla and exploration firm SpaceX came a day after a Wall Street Journal report saying the company had been formed.

The Journal reported that the new startup will focus on "neural lace" technology which involves implanting tiny brain electrodes capable of uploading and downloading thoughts.

The report said Musk may play a "significant leadership role" even as he runs two other large companies.

Musk has previously spoken about the idea of neural lacing, claiming it can magnify people's brain power by linking them directly to computing capabilities.

- Battling evil -

The risk that he referred to in his Twitter post was likely linked to his concern that artificial intelligence could become a threat to humans.

Musk not long ago found himself in the middle of a technology world controversy by holding firm that AI could turn on humanity and be its ruin instead of a salvation.

He took part in creating a nonprofit research company devoted to developing artificial intelligence that will help people and not hurt them.

Technology giants including Google, Apple and Microsoft have been investing in making machines smarter, contending the goal is to improve lives.

"If we create some digital super-intelligence that exceeds us in every way by a lot, it is very important that it be benign," Musk said last year at a conference in California.

He reasoned that even a benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI would put people so far beneath the machine they would be "like a house cat."

"I don't love the idea of being a house cat," Musk said, envisioning the creation of neural lacing that magnifies people's brain power by linking them directly to computing capabilities.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Musk_diving_into_minds_while_reaching_for_Mars_999.html

 

[Torrakko]

Että ihan ladata/lähettää ajatuksia?? Onko tuo edes mahdollista mutta jos on niin missäs ne foliopipon teko-ohjeet olikaan..

 

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Onko tuo edes mahdollista mutta jos on niin missäs ne foliopipon teko-ohjeet olikaan..

 

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At a conference near Washington, D.C., in February, the commander of all Navy special operations units made an unusual request to industry: Develop and demonstrate technologies that offer “cognitive enhancement” capabilities to boost his elite forces’ mental and physical performance.


“We plan on using that in mission enhancement,” Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski said. “The performance piece is really critical to the life of our operators.”

Szymanski expanded on his remarks in a brief interview later, saying he has his eye on a number of technologies, including pharmaceutical aids. But the results of one breakthrough involving the direct application of electrical stimulation to the brain have particularly caught his eye.

“In experiments, people who were watching these screens … their ability to concentrate would fall off in about 20 minutes,” Szymanski said. “But they did studies whereby a little bit of electrical stimulation was applied, and they were able to maintain the same peak performance for 20 hours.”

Transcranial electrical stimulation was one of the technologies touted by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter in July 2016 as part of his Defense Innovation Unit (Experimental), or DIUx, initiative. Since then, multiple SEAL units have begun actively testing the effectiveness of the technology, officials with Naval Special Warfare Command told Military.com

“Earlier this year, Naval Special Warfare units, working with DIUx, began a specific cognitive enhancement project with a small group of volunteers to test and evaluate achieving higher performance through the use of neuro-stimulation technology,” Capt. Jason Salata, a spokesman for the command, said in a statement.

The elements testing the technology include Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the unit known more popularly as SEAL Team Six. Other teams are also conducting tests, Salata said. He declined to confirm how many operators are participating in the testing, or to cite specific findings to date. But there have been positive outcomes so far, he said.

“Early results show promising signs,” he said. “Based on this, we are encouraged to continue and are moving forward with our studies.”

The company that makes the brain-stimulating device — a headset that could be mistaken for a pair of Beats by Dre headphones — is Halo Neuroscience. And the technology offers not cognitive enhancement, but neuro-priming, Chief Technology Officer and Company Co-Founder Brett Wingeier told Military.com.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/...ts-pursue-brain-stimulating-technologies.html

 

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DARPA is known for issuing big challenges. Still, the mission statement for its new Neural Engineering Systems Design program is a doozy: Make neural implants that can record high-fidelity signals from 1 million neurons.


Today’s best brain implants, like the experimental system that a paralyzed man used to control a robotic arm, record from just a few hundred neurons. Recording from 1 million neurons would provide a much richer signal that could be used to better control external devices such as wheelchairs, robots, and computer cursors.

What’s more, the DARPA program calls for the tech to be bidirectional; the implants must be able to not only record signals, but also to transmit computer-generated signals to the neurons. That feature would allow for neural prosthetics that provide blind people with visual information or deaf people with auditory info.

Today the agency announced the six research groups that have been awarded grants under the NESD program. In a press release, DARPA says that even the 1-million-neuron goal is just a starting point. “A million neurons represents a miniscule percentage of the 86 billion neurons in the human brain. Its deeper complexities are going to remain a mystery for some time to come,” says Phillip Alvelda, who launched the program in January. “But if we’re successful in delivering rich sensory signals directly to the brain, NESD will lay a broad foundation for new neurological therapies.”

http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-...n-implants-that-record-from-1-million-neurons

 

[Nojatuolistrategi]

Sama pää kesät talvet, mutta eri aivot.

Elon Muskin uusi hurja yritys: Aivoimplantteja sairaille

Avaruusyrittäjän start-up hakee lupia eläinkokeiden aloittamiseen.

Gizmodo kertoo SpaceX- ja Tesla-superyrittäjä Elon Muskin Neuralink-yhtiön aikovan testata elävillä eläimillä aivoihin asennettavia siirrännäisiä.

Asia ilmenee Neuralinkin San Franciscon toimiston kirjeestä. Siinä mainitaan yhtiön tiloissa tulevan olemaan jyrsijöitä ja tiloissa tapahtuvan in vivo -testejä.

Elon Musk on sanonut Neuralinkin tulevan keskittymään aivosiirrännäisiin tietyille vammaisille tai sairaille ihmisille. Neuralink aikoo kehittää ihmisten aivojen kykyjä. Musk on todennut tekniikan olevan 7-9 vuoden päässä.

”Ensimmäinen asia tulee olemaan infarktien aiheuttamien aivovaurioiden korjaaminen tai syövän aiheuttamien vammojen korjaaminen, joissa joku on pysyvästi menettänyt tietyn kognitiivisen kyvyn”, Elon Musk on todennut.

https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/elon-muskin-uusi-hurja-yritys-aivoimplantteja-sairaille/

 

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How do you know if a cyborg mouse with mind-controlling hardware in its brain is really under human command as it navigates a maze? If it scurries right past a sexy lady mouse and an enticing pile of food to reach the end.

If you want to get straight to the point (like the mice), scroll down to the video below and start watching at 2:05.

A team of Korean researchers created their ingenious cyborg mice by tapping into a brain circuit involved when an animal investigates a new object or gives chase to prey.

They outfitted each mouse with headgear that served a dual purpose: It held a fiber optic thread that penetrated the skull to stimulate that object-craving region of the brain (via a stimulation technique called optogenetics), and it also suspended an object in front of the mouse’s head.

Then the researchers, led by engineer Phill-Seung Lee and biologist Daesoo Kim from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), used a remote control to guide the animals’ movements. By sending a signal to the headgear, they could switch on the brain stimulator and cause a mouse to scamper straight ahead, or they could swing the suspended object left or right, thus steering the animal into left or right turns. The highly motivated mouse kept hurrying toward that desirable object, but found that it was always just out of reach.

The researchers describe their system in the journal Nature Neuroscience. To test it out, they sent cyborg male mice through a maze with seven different components, including both physical challenges like a mesh ladder and the aforementioned distracters of a female mouse in heat and a dish of food.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human...borg-mice-through-maze-with-brain-stimulation

 

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Engineers at Stanford University have built a new kind of millimeter-scale nerve-stimulating implant that beats all others of its size at a crucial parameter: how deep inside the body it can operate. The 6.5-millimeter-long programmable implant can receive both power and data via ultrasound through more than 10.5 centimeters of tissue. That’s deep enough for most any application, say its inventors. And because of its versatility and small size—with some modification it could be injected through a needle rather than requiring real surgery—they envision that it will greatly expand the number of conditions treated with electrical stimulation of the body’s nerves.

So far, most of those treatments have focused on stimulating spinal nerves for controlling pain and the vagus nerve for epilepsy and depression. However, researchers have been working on expanding the role of such “electroceutical” treatments to include ending postpartum bleeding, alleviating rheumatoid arthritis, and restoring bladder control, among many others.

Because implants today require surgery, “implantable devices are seen as a last resort solution,” says Stanford University assistant professor electrical engineering Amin Arbabian. “If you have a disease with any other solution you’ll probably opt for that.” But a nerve stimulator that can be implanted with minimillaly invasive surgery or simply be injected would allow nerve stimulation treatments to reach 100-fold more patients, he argues.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human...d-injectable-nerve-implant-works-deep-in-body

 

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https://qz.com/1293788/the-first-pe...rolled-robotic-arm-is-teaching-himself-piano/

 

[Ottoville]

Eipä ollut taaskaan foorumille sopiva juttu.

 

[Vääpeli]

Inkat hyviä, länsimaalaiset huonoja. Seuraavassa osassa kuinka Asteekit osasivat poistaa sydämmen nopeammin kuin nykyiset kirurgit.
Jos kulttuuri pari tuhatta vuotta harjoittelee jotain toistuvasti, niin yllätys yllätys. Niistä saattaa jopa kehittyä hyviä siinä.
Ja sitten voikin jättää kertomatta myös, että Inkat harjoitti myös kultalevyjen asentamisia päänuppeihin ja muitakin päänmuodon muokkauksia....
https://www.tiede.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/suipot-paat-perussa-kertoivat-luokka-asemasta

 

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