Scientists from Germany and Switzerland – including a Greek researcher of the diaspora – presented a new method, which allowed communication with a patient who can not speak or move and is in a completely paralyzed state of locked-in state in his body. It is a computer that decodes the signals of the “locked” patient’s brain and converts them into letters on a screen.
Researchers led by Niels Birbaumer of the University of Tübingen and Jonas Zimmermann of the Wyss Center for Bio-Neuroimaging in Geneva, published in the journal Nature Communications, said the achievement was patients with inclusion syndrome, thanks to the use of the new brain-computer interface (BCI).
Devices like this can restore communication with people who have lost the ability to move or talk. So far, research in this area has focused heavily on patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease, a neurodegenerative disease that leads to progressive loss of voluntary muscle control.
To date, various techniques have been developed that allow these patients to use their eyes or facial muscles to communicate. But once muscle control is completely lost, patients also lose the ability to communicate, remaining in a state of “confinement” in their body.
This time, after more than two years of research with this 34-year-old man, the researchers, using an auditory neurofeedback system (a type of BCI), which was surgically implanted in the motor cortex of the fully “locked” patient with ALS, who he had no muscular control over his body, they managed to form words and phrases that allowed him to communicate with him at an average rate of about one character per minute.
The patient was given auditory feedback on his neuronal activity and instructed to match the frequency of a sound with the activity of brain neurons, in a way that could be interpreted as “yes” or “no”. The patient was also able to modify the stimulation of his neurons, based on auditory feedback, so that he chooses letters to form words and phrases in order to communicate.
The brain signals are recorded by the implanted microelectrodes and then decoded in real time by an artificial intelligence (machine learning) system. The algorithm interprets the brain signals to mean either “yes” or “no”. Then another program reads the letters of the alphabet aloud and through the audio feedback the patient can choose “yes” or “no” for each letter, so slowly in this way, rejecting or accepting a letter, he can form an entire word or phrase.
Zimmermann said: “The study answers a chronic question, whether people with complete inclusion syndrome who have lost all voluntary muscle control, including eye or mouth movements, also lose the ability of their brain to generate commands. communication. In the past, successful communication through BCI with paralyzed individuals had been achieved. However, as far as we know, our study is the first to communicate with someone who no longer had any voluntary movement and for whom the BCI interface is therefore now the only means of communication.
The researchers said the method could be used even in a patient’s home. They noted, however, that before the new method could be widely used clinically, more research would have to be done on more patients to confirm its safety and effectiveness. The number of people with ALS worldwide is constantly increasing and is expected to exceed 300,000 by 2040, with many of them having reached a stage where they can not even speak.
A key contributor to the development of the new method was the neuro-engineer Ioannis Vlachos, a researcher at the Wyss Center, a graduate of the School of Electrical Engineering of the NTUA, with a PhD (2011) in Computational Neuroscience from the German University of Freiburg.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
