BrainInsight: 2022 - Issue 1

Communicated by Distinguished Professor Chin-Teng Lin 

RESEARCH

May 2022

Chin-Teng Lin and Alka Rachel John

Humans are easily overwhelmed with tasks that push them beyond their capabilities. Despite their remarkable resilience to diverse working conditions, the work environment must be adapted to afford comfortable interactions with human operator abilities. Modern work environments position human operators at a supervisory level where they have extensive interactions with technology and must integrate multiple streams of information, demanding more cognitive resources and resulting in a higher workload in the human operators. 

May 2022

RESEARCH

Jihun Lee, Ahhyoung Lee, Vincent Leung, Farah Laiwalla, Arto Nurmikko

The concept of brain circuits computing as an extended network, composed of billions of neurons represents a contemporary view which is exploited in research of brain-machine interfaces (BMI). Population dynamics recorded from ensembles of neurons have been dominated by intracortical silicon-based microelectrode arrays (MEA), monolithic ‘beds of needles’, wired to external signal processing electronics. The work has deepened our understanding of underlying functional principles especially of the motor cortex as a network, leading to first clinical trials of human BMIs. The importance of computational techniques in neural decoding in this highly undersampled circumstance is demonstrated in the example study: e.g. recent work by the Stanford group where pattern recognition of spiking neural population has demonstrated a BMI hand writing-to-text capability. A forward-looking question is about the type of neural recording device technologies which are scalable and able to access a much larger number of neurons for decoding complex motor, sensory, and perhaps even cognitive tasks.

May 2022

RESEARCH

Abraham Akinin, Jeremy M. Ford, Jiajia Wu, Chul Kim, Hiren D. Thacker, Patrick P. Mercier, and Gert Cauwenberghs.

Sight is integral to our ability to perceive and interact with the world. The visual system captures information in such detail that it encompasses almost the entire sensory input bandwidth of the brain. And yet, millions of patients are afflicted with blindness requiring assistive technologies and community accommodation.  A growing number of these cases are caused by diseases that result neural degeneration of photoreceptor cells in the retina such as Age-related Macular Degeneration.  Implantable prosthetics to electrically stimulate the retina and restore vision are an active area of academic research and commercialization efforts.  Unfortunately, considerable efforts have not produced a significant quality of life enhancement parallel to the astounding results of cochlear implants to restore hearing. To get there, novel approaches are needed to overcome the field’s main challenges: limited resolution and obtrusive packaging. 

May 2022

RESEARCH

Kuanming Yao, Guangyao Zhao, Xinge Yu

Distinguished from conventional rigid electronics, soft electronics is becoming a novel platform for next-generation biomedical instrumentations. With advanced materials, mechanics, and structural design, soft electronics could be realized in thin, light-weighted formats and thus can be worn on or implanted in human body, and may excel in great stretchability and conformal attachment with skin or tissue, which ensures continuous and precise healthcare monitoring or therapies. Our group focuses on exploring the novel soft electronics for the applications in various fields of biomedical applications, including motion and mechanical sensing, wearable energy harvesting, dynamic temperature sensing, sweat sensing, and closed-loop human-machine interface.

May 2022

RESEARCH

Adam Li, Chester Huynh, Zachary Fitzgerald, Iahn Cajigas, Damian Brusko, Jonathan Jagid, Angel Claudio, Andres Kanner, Jennifer Hopp, Stephanie Chen, Jennifer Haagensen, Emily Johnson, William Anderson, Nathan Crone, Sara Inati, Kareem Zaghloul, Juan Bulacio, Jorge Gonzalez-Martinez, and Sridevi V. Sarma

Over 3.4 million people in the US have epilepsy and 30% of these patients have drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE), where they do not respond to medication. DRE patients are burdened by epilepsy-related disabilities and frequently hospitalized constituting around $13 billion dollars annually spent for treating epilepsy patients in the USA. Successful surgical treatment necessitates complete elimination of the brain region(s) known as the seizure onset zone (SOZ). Between 30%-70% of patients continue to have seizures 6 months after treatment due to mislocalization of the SOZ. We developed neural fragility, an electroencephalogram (EEG) marker for the SOZ, and validated it in a retrospective study of 91 patients predicting surgical outcomes using neural fragility conditioned on the clinically labeled SOZ. Fragility predicted 43 out of the 47 surgical failures correctly and had an overall accuracy of 76%, compared to the clinical accuracy of 48% (successful outcomes). Neural fragility outperformed 20 other EEG features on the same set of cross-validation samples suggesting it as a potential EEG biomarker for the SOZ.