Paralysed woman's thoughts control robotic arm

A new advanced control of a robotic arm has been achieved using a paralysed woman's thoughts. Jan Scheuermann, who is 53 and paralysed from the neck down, was able to deftly grasp and move a variety of objects just like a normal arm. Brain implants were used to control the robotic arm, in the study reported in the Lancet medical journal.

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Brain Implant Improves Thinking

Scientists have designed a brain implant that sharpened decision making and restored lost mental capacity in monkeys, providing the first demonstration in primates of the sort of brain prosthesis that could eventually help people with damage from dementia, strokes or other brain injuries.

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Scientists read dreams

Brain scans during sleep can decode visual content of dream.  Researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep. The researchers extracted key words from the participants’ verbal reports, and picked 20 categories that appeared most frequently in their dream reports.

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Brainwave training boosts brain network for cognitive control

Researchers at  University of Western Ontario and the Lawson Health Research Institute have found that functional changes within a key brain network occur directly after a 30-minute session of noninvasive, neurofeedback training.

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How a Vision Prosthetic Could Bypass the Visual System

Electrical stimulation of the visual cortex may one day give image perception to blind people. Work presented at the Society for Neuroscience 2012 meeting in New Orleans suggested a way to create a completely new kind of visual prosthetic—one that restores vision by directly activating the brain.

In a poster session, researchers presented results showing how electrical stimulation of the visual cortex can evoke the sensation of simple flashes of light—including spatial information about those flashes. 

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Brain Implant Detects, Responds to Epilepsy

Next year, medical researchers will test in patients a one-of-a-kind brain implant that can sense electrical activity in the brain while simultaneously emitting electric pulses, says device developer Medtronic.

Deep-brain stimulators are mainly used to regulate the movement problems associated with Parkinson's and other diseases, but they are also used in Europe and Canada to treat epilepsy and are being used experimentally to treat severe depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But doctors must use trial and error to determine the best parameters for the electrical stimulation programmed into each patient's chip.

The smarter brain stimulator is an improved version of Medtronic's existing deep-brain stimulator device, which has already been implanted in more than 80,000 people around the world. Medtronic has added an extra chip so that it can detect electrical activity and respond automatically to changes in the brain. 

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An Operating System for the Cyber War Era

Kaspersky thinks it can protect the control systems for power plants and other critical infrastructure. Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the Russian company Kaspersky, which has led discovery and analysis of state-backed malware such as Stuxnet, wrote in a blog post today that the project was needed to protect “defenseless” industrial control software.

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A wireless low-power, high-quality EEG headset

Imec, Holst Centre and Panasonic have developed a new prototype of a wireless EEG (electroencephalogram) headset designed to be a reliable, high-quality and wearable EEG monitoring system.

The system combines ease-of-use with ultra-low power electronics. Continuous impedance monitoring and the use of active electrodes increases the quality of EEG signal recording compared to former versions of the system.

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Brain scans may help personalize treatments

A new study indicates that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy.

Social anxiety is usually treated with either cognitive behavioral therapy or medications. However, it is currently impossible to predict which treatment will work best for a particular patient. The team of researchers from MIT, Boston University (BU) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the effectiveness of therapy could be predicted by measuring patients’ brain activity as they looked at photos of faces, before the therapy sessions began.

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Brain scans detect early signs of autism

Abnormal brain development in high-risk infants who develop autism may be detected as early as age 6 months — before the appearance of autism symptoms.

Autism is typically diagnosed around the age of 2 or 3. Research suggests that the symptoms of autism — problems with communication, social interaction and behavior — can improve with early intervention.

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MRI scanners affect concentration and visuospatial awareness

Standard head movements made while exposed to one of the three electromagnetic fields produced by a heavy duty MRI scanner seem to temporarily lower concentration and visuospatial awareness, shows an experimental study published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The effects were particularly noticeable in tasks requiring high levels of working memory, which may have implications for surgeons and other healthcare staff working within the vicinity of an MRI scanner, the research indicates.

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Software Detects Motion that the Human Eye Can't See

A new set of software algorithms can amplify aspects of a video and reveal what is normally undetectable to human eyesight, making it possible to, for example, measure someone's pulse by shooting a video of him and capturing the way blood is flowing across his face.

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Human Stem Cells Found to Restore Memory

StemCells Inc. announced that its human stem cells restored memory in rodents bred to have an Alzheimer's-like condition—the first evidence that human neural stem cells can improve memory. The company hopes a clinical trial of its proprietary stem cells in rodents will lead to a clinical trial with Alzheimer's patients.


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Diagnosing Parkinson's in a phone call with a computer

Parkinson's affects some 6 million people worldwide. Although surgery and drugs can hold back its progression, there is no cure. Diagnosing it and tracking its course usually relies on an assessment of someone's symptoms using the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale, which involves tests of motor skills, for example. The process is time-consuming, expensive and requires people to attend a clinic for the tests to be carried out. It is partly because of this that it is thought that around a fifth of cases of Parkinson's are never diagnosed. A speech-processing algorithm could use the sound of your voice to diagnose a range of diseases, and spell the end of invasive physical exams.

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Brain computer interface for vegetative-state patients

The first real-time brain-scanning speller will allow people in an apparent vegetative state (unable to speak or move) to communicate, according to Maastricht University scientists.

The new technology builds on earlier uses of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans by Adrian Owen and colleagues to assess consciousness by enabling patients to answer yes and no questions. fMRI tracks brain activity by measuring blood flow.

“The work led me to wonder whether it might even become possible to use fMRI, mental tasks, and appropriate experimental designs to freely encode thoughts, letter-by-letter, and therewith enable back-and-forth communication in the absence of motor behavior,” said Bettina Sorger of Maastricht University in The Netherlands.

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Brain Scan for Alzheimer's

Beginning next month, doctors can use a brain scan to better diagnose Alzheimer's. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved a fluorescent dye that binds to amyloid plaques, a physical hallmark of the disease, as a diagnostic tool.

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The Puzzling Role Of Biophotons In The Brain

In recent years, a growing body of evidence shows that photons play an important role in the basic functioning of cells. Most of this evidence comes from turning the lights off and counting the number of photons that cells produce. It turns out, much to many people's surprise, that many cells, perhaps even most, emit light as they work. Various work suggests that neurons emit and even conduct photons. Could it be that biophotons help to synchronise the brain?

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Transforming Scar Tissue Into Beating Hearts

The latest research developments to reprogram scar tissue resulting from myocardial infarction (MI) into viable heart muscle cells, were presented at the Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology (FCVB) 2012 meeting, held 30 March to 1 April at the South Kensington Campus of Imperial College in London.

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New automated tomography imaging process speeds up whole-brain mapping

Serial Two-Photon Tomography (STP tomography), a new technology developed by neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and MIT, significantly speeds up the process of acquiring highly detailed anatomical images of whole brains. Until now, the process has been painstakingly slow and available only to a handful of highly specialized research teams.

STP tomography achieves high-throughput fluorescence imaging of whole mouse brains via robotic integration of the two fundamental steps — tissue sectioning and fluorescence imaging. At 10x magnification of brain tissue samples, the researchers were able to achieve fast imaging at a resolution sufficient to visualize the distribution and morphology of green-fluorescent protein-labeled neurons, including their dendrites and axons, Osten reports.

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Decoding brain activity to identify imagined speech

Neuroscientists at University of California, Berkeley have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain’s temporal lobe — the seat of the auditory system — as a person listens to normal conversation. Brain activity was recorded using implanted electrode array.  Based on this correlation between sound and brain activity, they then were able to predict the words the person had heard solely from the temporal lobe activity.

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Getting the measure of MRI

Oxford University scientists have come up with a new approach for measuring neurophysiology with quantitative images of cerebrovascular parameters are created from a single scan. This new approac improves  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that produces pictures of changes in brain activity into a full numerical measure of how the brain is working. Doctors may be able to use this new MRI approach to provide a lot more clinically useful information about patients coming in with strokes, brain injuries or a variety of other conditions.

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The Mystery Behind Anesthesia

Mapping how our neural circuits change under the influence of anesthesia could shed light on one of neuroscience's most perplexing riddles: consciousness.

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The Pill That Could Cure Depression by Growing Your Brain

If you are depressed, or schizophrenic or have Alzheimer's, scientists say you probably have a shrunken hippocampus. The good news: a drug that just entered human trials promises to re-grow that part of the brain.

It's an entirely new approach to treating clinical depression, which is the first of several diseases scientists at biotech company Neuralstem are hoping to address with their experimental oral drug. Most antidepressants work on brain chemistry, tweaking levels of neurotransmitters including serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. This is the first drug that aims to re-grow patients' atrophied brains.

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