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| Walking again after spinal injury Posted: 16 Feb 2013 09:00 PM PST In the lab, rats with severe spinal cord injury are learning to walk?and run?again. Last June in the journal Science, Grégoire Courtine, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), reported that rats in his lab are not only voluntarily initiating a walking gait, but they were sprinting, climbing up stairs, and avoiding obstacles after a couple of weeks of neurorehabilitation with a combination of a robotic harness and electricalchemical stimulation.
Now, at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, Courtine describes this research in detail and the next steps towards clinical trials to be done in Switzerland. Courtine holds the International Paraplegic Foundation (IRP) Chair in Spinal Cord Repair at EPFL. At AAAS, in a symposium titled, ?Engineering the Nervous System: Solutions to Restore Sight, Hearing, and Mobility,? he outlines the range of neuroprosthetic technologies developed in his lab, which aim to restore voluntary control of locomotion after severe spinal cord injury. He explains how he and his colleagues are interfacing the central nervous system with stretchable spinal electrode arrays controlled with smart stimulation algorithms ? combined with novel robotic rehabilitation ? and shows videos of completely paralyzed rats voluntarily moving after only weeks of treatment. Courtine expects to begin clinical trials in human patients within the next two years. At AAAS, he presents the 9 million euro European project NeuWalk (www.neuwalk.com), an effort dedicated to the transfer of technology from rats over to humans with spinal cord damage through development of effective neuroprosthetic systems for rehabilitation. The first phase of clinical studies will be conducted at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), which has developed extensive expertise in the electrical-chemical stimulation of the human spinal cord. The second phase will take place at the newly planned EPFL Valais Wallis academic cluster in Valais, Switzerland, to be inaugurated in 2015. This health and biotechnology center in Valais will focus on new treatments and rehabilitation for people with physical disabilities. This research program has the potential to develop effective treatment paradigms for rehabilitating individuals with severe spinal cord injury, for whom current rehabilitative treatments do not restore the ability to stand or walk. Contact: Hillary Sanctuary hillary.sanctuary@epfl.ch 41-797-034-809 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
| Brain prostheses create a sense of touch Posted: 15 Feb 2013 09:00 PM PST Rats can’t usually see infrared light, but they have “touched” it in a Duke University lab. The rats sensed the light as a sensation of touch after Duke neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis and his team fitted the animals with an infrared detector wired to electrodes implanted in the part of the mammalian brain that processes information related to the sense of touch.
One of the main flaws of current human, brain-controlled prosthetics is that patients cannot sense the texture of what they touch, Nicolelis said. His goal is to give quadriplegics not only the ability to move their limbs again, but also to sense the texture of objects placed in their hands or experience the nuances of the terrain under their feet. His lab studies how to connect brain cells with external electrodes for brain-machine interfaces and neural prosthetics in human patients and non-human primates, giving them the ability to control limbs, both real and virtual, using only their minds. He and his team have shown that monkeys, without moving any part of their real bodies, could use their electrical brain activity to guide the virtual hands of an avatar to touch virtual objects and recognize their simulated textures. His latest study, published Feb. 12 in Nature Communications, shows that the rats’ cortexes respond both to the simulated sense of touch created by the infrared light sensors and to whisker touch, as if the cortex is dividing itself evenly so that the brain cells process both types of information. This plasticity of the brain counters the current “optogenetic” approach to brain stimulation, which suggests that a particular neuronal cell type should be stimulated to generate a desired neurological function. Instead, stimulating a broader range of cell types might help a cortical region adapt to new sensory sources, Nicolelis said. His team recently documented the firing patterns of nearly 2,000 individual, interconnected neurons in monkeys. Recording the electrical activity from thousands of neurons at once is important for improving the accuracy and performance of neuroprosthetic devices, he said. This brain-machine interface work is all part of an international effort called the Walk Again Project to build a whole-body exoskeleton that could help paralyzed people regain motor and sensory abilities using brain activity to control the apparatus. He and his collaborators expect to first use the exoskeleton in the opening ceremony of the FIFA Soccer World Cup in June 2014. Nicolelis said infrared sensing might be built into such an exoskeleton so patients wearing the suit could have sensory information about where their limbs are and how objects feel when they touch them. Nicolelis is a professor of neurobiology, biomedical engineering and psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. He is also founder of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering. He earned his M.D. from the University of Sao Paulo Medical School and his Ph.D. from the Institute of Biomedical Science at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. ### Contact information:
Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., Ph.D. Links: Nicolelis lab: http://www.nicolelislab.net/ TED MED 2012 talk: http://youtu.be/WFzvhZ1qhRg Book — Beyond Boundaries: http://www.beyondboundariesnicolelis.net/~beyond/wordpress/ Walk Again Project: http://www.walkagainproject.org/ Related news: Neuroprosthesis Gives Rats the Ability to “Touch” Infrared Light Brain Power Moves Virtual Objects Nearly Two Thousand Brain Cells Recorded at One Time Publications: “Perceiving invisible light through a somatosensory cortical prosthesis.” Thomson, E. et. al. 2013. Nature Communications. Feb. 12. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2497 “Active tactile exploration using a brain?machine?brain interface.” O’Doherty, J. et. al. 2011. Nature 479, 228?. DOI:10.1038/nature10489 “Mind in Motion.” 2012. Sci. Am. 307: 58-63. “Stochastic Facilitation of Artificial Tactile Sensation in Primates.” Medina, L., et. al 2012. J. Neurosci. 32: 14271-14275, 2012. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3115-12.2012 “Reprogramming movements: Extraction of motor intentions from cortical ensemble activity when movement goals change.” 2012. Ifft, P., et. al. Front. Neuroeng. 5:16. DOI: 10.3389/fneng.2012.00016 Contact: Ashley Yeager |
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