- 8 months ago
This is an inside look at how teams of scientists, engineers and surgeons—and their courageous test subjects—are using Brain-Computer Interfaces to bring hope and increased independence to patients living with conditions like paralysis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and blindness.
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At GlobalStudy TV, we bring you inspiring and informative documentaries, stories, and videos from the world of education.
Whether you're a student, educator, policymaker, or simply curious about global education, you'll find valuable insights and compelling stories here.
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00:00Gert-Jan Askam has been unable to walk on his own since a motorcycle accident in 2011 paralyzed him from the waist down.
00:12Now, using a device implanted in his brain and his spine, that is about to change.
00:21In the future, conditions like paralysis, ALS, and perhaps even blindness will mean something very different from what they meant just a generation ago.
00:34Imagine controlling screens and being able to do all these activities just by thinking about it.
00:41This is the dawn of a new scientific era where brains and computers team up to help those who need it regain their independence.
00:50The journey to that future is the story of these pioneering technologies and the patients willing to test them.
01:02It's a journey that begins with a series of movements across a computer screen and one extraordinary step.
01:11Across the world, tech companies and universities are vying to discover the best way to connect our minds to machines.
01:26Machines that will translate our thoughts and intentions into electronic signals that can control computers, prosthetic limbs, and any device connected to a digital network.
01:39Here's the brain. There's the device inside the brain.
01:44At the center of this scientific revolution lies technology known as a brain-computer interface, or a BCI.
01:53Brain-computer interface is a neural technology that acquires information from the brain, processes it, and then uses it to elicit a specific action.
02:04Scientists have long understood that brain activity can be measured and analyzed.
02:11And now, they're starting to harness it as well.
02:14When neurons fire in your brain, there's an electrical potential that happens.
02:18And if you were to put a simple voltage checker from one part of your head to another part of your head and actually take a voltage measurement, you would actually see that there's a voltage there.
02:31And if you take that measurement 250 times per second, now you have a little electrical waveform.
02:38That's exactly the signals that we process when we look at brain-computer interfacing.
02:43Every action directed by our brain generates a unique pattern of neural signals.
02:50Decoding those signals and producing the effect the brain intended is at the center of brain-computer interfacing.
02:59Take, for example, the simple task of operating an internet browser.
03:05As an able-bodied individual, if I decided that I wanted to click on a hyperlink on a web page, I would, first of all, see that web page, pick that link out of any of the other links.
03:15After that decision is made, the brain sends a signal via the motor cortex and the spinal cord to the hand.
03:24And it would cause my hand to move forward.
03:27Then eventually, I click a button, that cursor clicks the link, and, you know, we're good.
03:34For someone with a spinal cord injury, the brain can still fire off instructions to click on a link.
03:41But that message can't get through to the hand, due to the injury.
03:46So one way that we can directly help someone with a spinal cord injury is to decode those representations
03:53and actually translate that into direct movement of the cursor.
03:57That way they don't actually have to move their arm.
03:59They don't have to click a button on a mouse.
04:02You can just shortcut all of that.
04:04By intercepting signals meant for the hands, a brain-computer interface can give a user the type of freedom to operate a digital device they may have had before an injury.
04:17And as our reliance on digital devices grows, so too does the level of independence one may experience with a BCI.
04:28But before the benefits of a BCI can be experienced, it needs to be installed or implanted.
04:36And since this technology is still so new, that typically means signing up for a clinical trial.
04:46At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, Griffin Millsap and Francesco Tonori have been testing implanted brain-computer interfaces in a series of feasibility trials.
05:01Before their team implants the device, however, they need to become intimately familiar with the patient's brain.
05:08The individual folds of a brain are like a thumbprint. They're very specific to a person.
05:14So when somebody elects to have an implant done, pre-surgical planning is a very important part of this where the subject consents to various imaging being taken.
05:26The test subject will have an MRI and an fMRI, which helps the team map out which parts of the brain are firing as they try to perform different tasks.
05:39We print out the subject's brain from that scan, and then we just kind of figure out,
05:44alright, we have this many sensors that we can put onto the brain. How should we place them? How should we rotate them?
05:51And then where do the wires' routes actually come out?
05:55The most common BCIs are tiny. Their electrodes are just 1 to 1.5 millimeters long.
06:02But since the neurons the device is targeting are located in the outer layer of the brain,
06:08the electrodes embed precisely where the action is.
06:12The closer you are to the neurons themselves, the better, the stronger the signal is going to be.
06:20There's an analogy that scientists in this field like to use. Imagine your brain is a stadium, and the individual neurons are the fans inside the stadium.
06:33If our stadium, for example, had a sporting event going on inside of it, and maybe someone scored a goal, the entire crowd would all exclaim at the same time.
06:42If you're outside of the stadium, you can probably hear that. You'd probably know that something exciting just happened.
06:48But what these scientists are after is how individual fans, or neurons, are reacting.
06:55So if you wanted to actually get an individual conversation inside of that stadium, the best way to do it is to put a microphone right next to those people.
07:04And when you do that, you get a much higher signal to noise ratio.
07:09And that's in fact why we do implants.
07:15We can put an electrode right next to the neural population of interest, and we can measure that and more directly decode that behavior.
07:24A trial conducted at the University of California, Davis, demonstrates what can be accomplished today with a well-placed BCI.
07:34Casey Harrell has been living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, for more than five years.
07:44His condition has left him with severely deteriorated mobility and speech.
07:51ALS is a neurodegenerative disease.
07:54It starts by impairing your motor capabilities.
07:57So that's why, over time, you become paralyzed.
08:01It usually starts from the periphery, so your hands and feet are the first things that you start losing disabilities on,
08:08and then it progressively works its way up towards the brain.
08:13The last thing that you're able to control are your voice and your mouth.
08:18Casey is eager to communicate with his family and friends, but his facial muscles that help form sounds are deteriorating.
08:29The UC Davis team has developed a way to bring his voice back with a brain-computer interface.
08:36This time, they are targeting the left precentral gyrus, the part of the brain that includes the primary motor cortex and is connected to speech.
08:48When we produce words, we're actually moving our mouths in a certain way.
08:55To make that happen, we move our tongues.
08:57And based on the neural data from those areas, we can then try to reconstruct what the intended word that we wanted to vocalize was.
09:07Every sound we make is connected to a unique combination of muscle movements that begins in the brain.
09:15So it's not that we're reading people's minds, we're not detecting their inner thought or their inner monologue.
09:23In essence, what we're doing is we're bypassing the injury.
09:26We're recording kind of from the source, from this part of the brain that's trying to send these commands to the muscles.
09:32In July of 2023, the UC Davis surgical team implanted four separate devices onto Casey's brain.
09:42And it didn't take long to see and hear the results.
09:47Okay, ready?
09:51That first time that he tried to speak and that word appeared on the screen.
09:56He started crying, I started crying, his family started crying.
10:06Everyone composed themselves.
10:08They were like, let's do it again.
10:10And it kept working.
10:11It was really special.
10:12It was a special moment.
10:17Within two days, the system had grown its potential vocabulary to 125,000 words and was able to display Casey's words with a 90% accuracy rate.
10:31Within months, that accuracy grew to more than 97%.
10:36This is by far the most accurate decoding ever reported.
10:41The team then wanted to take this idea one step further.
10:45They didn't just want to return Casey's ability to communicate.
10:49They wanted to return his ability to use his own voice.
10:54The easiest way to protect ourselves from mercury pollution is to limit our consumption.
10:59By using video recordings that were collected prior to him having ALS,
11:04we were able to digitally reconstruct his voice.
11:07So now when he tries to speak, not only do words appear on the screen, but it sounds like him.
11:13The results speak for themselves.
11:16Not being able to communicate is so frustrating and demoralizing.
11:20It is like you are trapped.
11:22I hope that we are at a time when everyone who is like me have the same opportunity as I do to have a device like this that will help them communicate.
11:32With his ability to communicate restored, Casey Harrell has returned to work and estimates that he uses his BCI for some 70 hours per week.
11:44But while the results are extraordinary, surgeries like his still come with risk.
11:51Risk that the device will not implant as precisely as the surgeons hoped or that the technology could become obsolete.
12:02There is also the threat of infection.
12:06These potential hazards have driven some researchers to look for another way to get a clear brain signal without implanting directly onto the brain itself.
12:16A company called Synchron believes it may have a solution.
12:22It has developed a technology that inserts a brain-computer interface.
12:26Not on the brain itself, but inside a blood vessel that passes right along the motor cortex.
12:33It sits on the surface of the brain and it listens to what's happening in the brain and then predicts what you're trying to move.
12:43And it converts that into a signal that goes out of the body to control a personal device.
12:48So we have our users think about trying to move certain parts of their body and then we convert those into key presses that I use to make selections on the screen.
13:04The receiver end of their device is called a stentrode and it works largely like a traditional stent.
13:12Stents remain in place by pressing up against the walls of a blood vessel.
13:18We've been really fortunate to see that the majority of people who have been implanted so far can use the technology readily.
13:28So we see one of our patients able to navigate a phone, others able to navigate tablets and even laptops.
13:36The opportunity to bring back the ability to communicate on someone's own terms is not only the humane thing to do, you know, it's a humane use of technology.
13:51But it's also medically necessary from a physical health standpoint.
13:56We can already see what can happen when a brain is connected directly to a computer.
14:02But what if that connection included an additional link?
14:07What if that connection also bridged two parts of the human body that had previously been severed?
14:18In Lausanne, Switzerland, a team at NeuroRestore wanted to tackle this very problem.
14:24Their mission, to reconnect the brain and spinal cord of a person who'd lost the ability to walk.
14:31Gert Jan Oskum would be the first patient to test the technology.
14:37Twelve years ago, I got an accident and had a spinal cord injury.
14:44So I'm not able to move my legs anymore.
14:48His spinal cord was severed at the cervical level.
14:53So you have to imagine that the pathway, the highway from the brain to the muscles, got disconnected due to this accident.
15:05The team created a solution they call a brain-spine interface.
15:10The concept behind this technology mirrors the ones being developed at places like the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and UC Davis.
15:22Our idea was to reestablish this communication with a digital bridge.
15:27An electronic communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord that is still intact.
15:33It can control the leg movement.
15:35For Gert Jan to take advantage of this new technology, he'd have to undergo a pair of complex surgeries, led by Dr. Jocelyn Block.
15:45There is one surgery at the level of the brain.
15:48We do two little craniotomy, put electrodes in order to record the brain signal.
15:54And another surgery at the level of the spinal cord where we put electrodes on the top of the spinal cord at the place that is responsible for leg movement.
16:06Before he could attempt to take a step, Gert Jan, along with the team, would need to calibrate the device.
16:14We ask the patient to visualize the different movements many times.
16:20And we have an algorithm, an artificial intelligence that will learn to recognize the signature, the electrical signature of these intentions.
16:31Once the algorithm learns the signatures of the brain's intentions, it sends signals down to the implant in the spinal cord, bypassing the lesion, to stimulate the muscles to contract and initiate movement.
16:46Allowing Gert Jan to do something the world had never seen before.
16:51Before his injury, the signals between Gert Jan's brain and legs seemed to flow instantaneously.
17:00With this interface, however, there's a slight lag, which takes some getting used to.
17:06We worked a lot to improve the latency, to decrease the time between his intention and the effect of the stimulation.
17:15In a few sessions, everything is linked and the patient starts training.
17:22The team designed a set of challenges and movement aids to support his rehabilitation.
17:31His goal was really to improve his walking in everyday life, so we focused mostly on step height, different exercises to be able to regain muscle strength on the hips,
17:44have a high foot clearance, have a high foot clearance, being able to walk independently and safely.
17:51And it didn't take long for Gert Jan to see progress.
17:57But for the scientists, the biggest surprise was yet to come.
18:03The rehabilitation triggered some plasticity and some neurological recovery by recruiting the spurt fibers that were going through his lesion,
18:13that he regained functions even when the system was turned off.
18:18As his training progressed, Gert Jan began to regain some ability to walk on his own with crutches.
18:27This neurological recovery was actually one hypothesis of the trial.
18:32And that's why we measured his performance with and without stimulation.
18:38Even after the clinical trial ended, Gert Jan continued to work with the Digital Bridge independently.
18:47Recently, he told us that he was using the system and went to paint his walls.
18:53Everything that requires standing, walking around his house, he is happy to use the system for that.
19:01He still uses his wheelchair most of his daily activity, but now he can achieve things that he would never have been doing 10 years ago.
19:12Gert Jan's efforts are helping the team understand not just what the Digital Bridge is capable of,
19:19but what its current limitations are as well.
19:24It's still in its early stages of development.
19:27It's bulky and too expensive to be made widely available.
19:32It also takes a lot of energy to operate.
19:37We have an autonomy of about two hours in battery life.
19:41So the next step for our technology is to miniaturize everything,
19:45so that the patient is able to turn on the stimulation in the morning,
19:49to turn off the stimulation at night without thinking about it
19:53and being able to use it continuously throughout the day.
19:58In clinical trials like this one, the users, like Gert Jan Oskum, are the unsung heroes.
20:08So for him, for Gert Jan, participating to the study was really not only about himself and regaining function,
20:17but also participating to the advancement of the technology and be this pioneer for the study.
20:29It was a long journey, but at the end, I can really build functional things from it.
20:36And the transformation in Gert Jan's life goes far beyond just day-to-day functional improvements.
20:43I'm training ten years to stand up with a friend having a beer.
20:49And that's something I think people don't realize.
20:53Our brain is central to how we perceive and interact with the world around us.
21:05While many of the BCIs being developed today are helping us translate the brain's intentions into physical actions,
21:13others are testing how we can use BCIs to restore some of our senses.
21:19While the devices used by Casey Harrell and Gert Jan Oskum carry neural signals out of the brain where they originate,
21:29other technologies aim to do the opposite, transmitting signals from our sensory world across an injury and into the brain.
21:40Cochlear implants have transformed the lives of the hearing impaired by delivering stimuli directly to the auditory nerve.
21:50Is it sounding better? Can you hear my voice now? Yeah? What about mom's voice?
21:56Can you hear my voice? Yes.
21:59So if that is possible, can we next return vision to the vision impaired as well?
22:11Vision loss has a lot of similarities with cochlear implants, with auditory loss.
22:17Where you decide to provide the visual information back to the user is where things are different.
22:27For example, you can interface with the retina directly.
22:32There is the optic nerve behind it, and then you can go all the way back to visual cortex.
22:37All these are part of the visual pathway that we rely on to be able to see.
22:43These three components, our eyes, our optic nerve, and the visual cortex,
22:50all offer opportunities to bring vision to an impaired user.
22:56While some companies are developing systems that bypass the eye and optic nerve,
23:02and stimulate the visual cortex inside the brain to create images.
23:07Others are following a model similar to cochlear implants,
23:11developing retinal implants placed on the back of the eye.
23:15A retinal prosthesis basically looks a little bit like the grid of electrodes that you place on the surface of the brain.
23:26It's just much smaller, still obviously made of biocompatible materials,
23:31and it sticks to the back of the eye.
23:34From that position, the device can then stimulate the optic nerve.
23:39A company called The Science Corporation, with their retinal implant called Prima, has developed this idea further.
23:51The results of a recent clinical trial found that of the 32 people who received their implant,
23:58and remained in the trial for a year, each one experienced improved vision.
24:04So, how does it work?
24:07The system is designed for those suffering from degenerative diseases,
24:12like age-related macular degeneration,
24:15a condition that impacts the eye's field of vision.
24:19The source of the problem is the retina,
24:23which first receives the visual stimulus,
24:27then sends it to the brain via the optic nerve.
24:36With the Prima system, a special set of glasses with an integrated camera,
24:41captures images in the wearer's field of view,
24:44then transmits the signals to a chip implanted in the retina,
24:49where they are then processed and transmitted to the brain's visual cortex.
24:54This video shows what those images appear like to the user.
25:01These initial results suggest that at least some forms of visual loss
25:07may soon be treatable with brain-computer interfaces.
25:12But there's another interesting angle to the Prima retinal implant.
25:17The device also includes a zoom function,
25:20something the eyes we are all born with do not have.
25:24It's an indication of how close we are to being able to use BCI's,
25:29not just to restore our human abilities, but to enhance them as well.
25:35How far we can push brain-computer interface technology
25:40will come down to how many points of contact we can make with the brain.
25:45Or, returning to a previous analogy,
25:48how many microphones we can install in the stadium of our mind.
25:53In the future, the number of electrodes that we're going to be using
25:56with our study participants is going to be enormous.
26:00And the more access you have, the more capabilities you have.
26:04Scientists can even imagine a time when BCI's have the ability to read one's thoughts.
26:10In the future, particularly if we can start to decode covert speech or like internal monologue,
26:18you could have potentially textual input interfaces to computers
26:22where you don't have to move your fingers and you can just kind of, you know, dialogue to the computer directly.
26:29We think that that's possible simply because there are still neural signals present when someone is not speaking,
26:39but is thinking of things to say.
26:42That whole idea of internal monologue, we see neural activity associated with it.
26:47We're not that great at decoding it, and it's a lower amplitude.
26:50It's just quieter, but it's still there.
26:53And once BCI's are able to read thoughts, a next leap could be to go from reading internal monologues
27:00to actively sharing them between multiple people.
27:05If I am able to think about what I'm saying and I can decode that accurately,
27:13then there will be a future in which then I can relay the information of what I'm thinking
27:19to another person telepathically.
27:23I've learned a lot throughout my time researching brain-computer interfaces.
27:28I think first and foremost I've learned that the human body is a very elegant structure
27:34that's very resilient in a lot of ways.
27:38So when you work with BCI's and you start looking at the neural activity that the brain is producing,
27:46you kind of feel in awe of the immense amount of work that's being done by the brain
27:54in doing things that we take for granted every day.
27:59In the future, more powerful devices with far more electrodes tapping into our nervous system
28:06will allow us to rehabilitate and enhance our bodies in ways that will challenge what we thought humans were capable of.
28:14And challenge, perhaps, what it means to be human.
28:20But today, what brain-computer interfaces are delivering is a new way forward
28:26for the courageous test subjects willing to offer their bodies and minds to this scientific revolution.
28:34These nuggets that we extract and then transform them into actions in the real world
28:40that allow the users to regain capabilities that they didn't have,
28:46that they had lost due to the injury or the illness,
28:49those are breathtaking moments.
28:51And this is kind of why we do the research that we do.
28:56And this is kind of why we do work here at the proper time.
28:58We want to improve the Mashable Center for the Declaration of Independence.
29:02So, we are going to create a path into domination.
29:04We are going to create a path into facts,
29:06and we will be able to train the knowledge of how to deal with the disease.
29:08We are going to create a path into our lives and our viable types of therapeutics.
29:10We are going to create a path into our bodies.
29:12We are going to create a path into our brain and our brain.
29:14We are going to create a path to discover changes.
29:16It's a path that we have to do the valley of our 종ris that we have together.
29:18We are going to get a path into our minds with our brains.
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