Wait, what? A minimally invasive _craniotomy_? Cutting open the skull generally isn't thought to be minimally invasive. Cool technique but a rather crazy title given that the paper barely touches on invasiveness. Much better would be "biocompatible" or "mechanically stable" or "long-lasting."
You still need a craniotomy, but the dura remains mostly intact. Rodent dura is a lot thinner than in primates though, so it'll be interesting to see whether it works in larger animals. I'd also like to see some actual data showing that these electrodes last longer. People can keep Utah arrays going for a few years, even though the implantation surgery is more invasive. (craniotomy + duratomy + pneumatic insertion).
Still, it's nice to see some innovation that might eventually work in large animals and humans, instead of yet another thing that only works in transgenic mice.
If the array works at all, we've been reliably able to get /something/ for at least a year and sometimes much more, which I guess isn't too inconsistent with that.
Still, a lot of our problems haven't been brain-related; instead, there's an infection or mechanical damage to the connector pedestal/wire bundle. I'm not sure that the sewing machine by itself will be able to sidestep those sorts of problems.
I would be very happy to see better alternatives. I'm just not ready to switch based on this.
Agreed, I've seen the same. Take that graph with a grain of salt and take a look at the failure modes table below it. Lots of monkey issues (about a quarter) and some totally unrelated things (like experiment termination).
Some labs/surgeons/methods have better success than others.
The big thing the sewing machine will do is (likely) reduce mechanical strain at the tissue-electrode interface and hopefully improve upon those handful of failures due to scar tissue encapsulation.
I had the same experience in my time at U. Pitt: arrays that worked at all worked for a couple years. I also spent a lot of time talking to people who had implanted Utah arrays at that time, and I found that there was a ton of variability in the details of how people performed the procedure. That was almost 10 years ago, so maybe there’s some stronger best practices now.
Anything that requires craniotomy will not scale to persons apart from patients with no alternatives and some biohacking freaks with no sense of danger.
Looks cool on paper, but they will have to find an alternative route to make it stick (no pun intended).
The abstract only mentions clinical and research use cases, it doesn't sound like they're expecting it to "stick" as a consumer electronics device in its current form.
Can we change the title to use the word "less" instead of "minimally"?
Their paper's title is kind of clickbait. This isn't minimally invasive -- it might be a bit less invasive than other methods, but it's still considered an invasive interface.
This is mostly meant for neuroscience research in animals.
The brain contains about 86B neurons, which use chemical and electrical signals to process information. Neuroscientists want to know what these cells are doing in healthy brains, and how that processing and signalling goes wrong in diseases. One way--arguably the best way--to do this is to implant animals with electrodes that record activity of nearby neurons, and see how it varies during different conditions (different behaviors, sensory inputs, drug treatments, etc). For obvious reasons, this should be as humane and non-invasive as possible, thus...this.
Humans also occasionally get electrodes implanted, either for deep brain stimulation (the most effective treatment for Parkinson's Disease) or to find the source (focus) of epileptic activity in the brain. This could potentially help with that too, though the deep brain targets are much, much further into the brain than the results reported here.
To elaborate a little bit more, brain activity can be measured non-invasively with things like EEG, MEG, fMRI, or fNIRS. However, these only let you look at the average activity of fairly large groups of neurons. EEG and MEG directly measures the neurons’ activity, and so have excellent temporal resolution, but their spatial specificity is pretty bad: EEG detects the electrical activity directly, but it’s smeared out by the skull and scalp; MEG avoids this by measuring magnetic fields, but can only sense them when they’re in certain orientations relative to the detectors, which limits where you can record on a curved, wrinkly brain. fMRI and fNIRS don’t sense the activity directly, but instead measure changes in blood flow/oxygenation that are related to neural activity. This is slower (by seconds) but has good spatial resolution. Thus, there’s not really an alternative for these invasive recordings...
> This is mostly meant for neuroscience research in animals.
Exactly! And thank you, nice summary.
It should be noted, with respect to other comments here as well, that in animals the cranial vault re-closes 4-8 weeks after a craniotomy/craniectomy (rats). Dead neurons basically never grow back. Hence 'minimally invasive' refers to the attempt to minimize the brain insult and injury.
A nice paper deserves a nice summary! I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes, as Utah arrays have been around for ~25 years and haven’t changed much.
Just OT and jet still X-files-themed, but wasn't there a media-promotion a few days ago, pointing to 'future-tec', where people can breath in vaccinations through the nose or nanobots, doing '1st aid' at the mall...? (-;
I find this article obviously hypes this technology, downplays that it is not surprisingly the military, DARPA, who are no doubt bringing us shooting autonomous robots that eventually will have accidents not unlike the already multiple times a year random violence events. That robot went haywire! No one has any responsibility besides this bad, bad, glitchy technology that we unfortunately depend on completely.
I would bet at least some coinage that some or another branch of intelligence networks is already testing this stufff on people who have essentially been disappeared. If they are outright stealing the kidneys of falun gong people, what human sacrifice would china not make to be able to stick a fork in someone's mind and read it?
And if CHINA is doing it, well then everybody else has to keep up!
Good times.
It's bizarre to me that anyone could write an article about this subject and not talk about the mother of all interrogation tools.
We need to defend the right to have an independent mind. If there are black sites and disappeared people, and the spy agencies can pretty much all go hog wild at the moment, where is the governing body that is going to potentially threaten spooks from abusing people horrifically with this stuff?
As I understand it, 5g will have enough bandwidth to have a decent throughput to fingernail sized devices. With a few electrodes could they outright puppet someone?
Why do so few tech articles ever talk about human rights and hype things without even basic analysis? Or it's the same, 'some critics say, it might be bad. oh well.'
And every time, 5 years later, 'oh it turns out google maps actually made a database of everyone's location who used it and then lied about doing that until it was no longer possible. Our motto is don't be evil. Well, not anymore. We don't have to do this interview. GUARDS!'
