In the Spotlight: Neuroengineering

TY - JOUR

T1 - In the Spotlight

T2 - Neuroengineering

AU - Thakor, Nitish

N1 - Funding Information: The Revolutionary Prosthesis program and the BCI/BMI research are just one or two of the many programs that serve to highlight the accomplishments in the field of Neuroengi-neering. It is evident that some of the problems in the field have posed “grand challenges” requiring large investments and multidisciplinary effort by teams of researchers in academia and industry to deliver the exciting results. Another example of an equally grand initiative is the Blue Brain project (http://blue-brain.epfl.ch/) led by Professor Henry Markram of EPFL, Switzerland, in partnership with IBM, to “reverse engineer” the brain and its functions at microscopic levels and commercial and clinical technologies such as modern imaging machines to image brain structure and function at exquisite detail. According to Terry Sejnowski at Salk Institute, “The hot area in Computational Neurosciences is Connectomics. Several groups are automating the 3-D reconstruction of neural circuits with high resolution. This has taken advances in computer vision, machine learning, and high-throughput electron microscopy.” The Neuroengineering field has received support from many agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF, www.nsf.gov). The NSF initiative on Collaborative Research in Computational Neurosciences (CRCNS, [13]) encourages team building across disciplines, particularly partnering computational scientists with experimental neuroscientists. A major new player in recent years has been the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (www.darpa.mil) with its focus on brain computer interface and neural prosthesis. As a consequence the funding in this field remains robust or even on an upswing. The NSF recognizes the many challenges the brain poses in its report, “Grand Challenges of Mind and Brain,” [14]. The National Academy of Engineering, in its recent solicitation on Grand Challenges for Engineering [15] recognizes “Reverse Engineer the Brain” as one of the top grand challenges. Funding Information: The highlight Neuroengineering research program of the past two year has been the “Revolutionary Prosthesis 2009 (RP2009)” funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) [4]. The ambitious goal of the project is to deliver a 22 degrees of freedom upper arm prosthesis controlled by direct neural, peripheral or cortical interface. With more than $70 Million funding over its four year cycle, the team led by Stuart Harshbarger at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory [5] brings together a consortium of universities and companies to develop a revolutionary prosthetic limb with outstanding anthropomorphic configuration that includes 22 degrees of freedom along with the mechanical performance, weight and power requirements compatible with human arm. More interestingly, research is underway to develop neural interfaces and neural control mechanisms to drive this limb. Work at University of Utah, among other institutions, focuses on the design and development of microelectrode technologies and very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuit interfaces. These systems were tested as peripheral nerve interfaces in animal models to control a prosthetic limb. More adaptive but complex interface is the cortical interface which provides signals from populations of neurons in the motor or premotor cortical areas. The experiments being done in primates by the RP2009 consortium members at the University of Rochester (team led by Dr. Marc Schieber), Stanford University (team led by Dr. Krishna Shenoy), and California Institute of Technology (team led by Dr. Richard Andersen) and signal analysis and integration done at The Johns Hopkins University (team led by Dr. Nitish Thakor) have begun to show neural spike (action potential) signals combined with advanced signal processing methods can provide command signals to drive the prosthetic limb and actuate the fingers of the prosthetic for dexterous control. It is worth emphasizing that the present experimental research is still being done on nonhuman primates. The road to full human implantation of the cortical interface, and testing control of the prosthesis by human subjects may be a long one. Eventual implantation of the neural interface and a nonexperimental use of the limb will require considerable safety and efficacy evaluations, experimental testing, regulatory approval, experimental clinical study design under appropriate institutional review guidelines and manufacturability and reliability of the limb. However, the work done by the team led by Todd Kuiken at Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago has paved the way for a neurally controlled prosthesis using the muscle signals stimulated by the reinnervated peripheral nerves from the amputee’s stump [6]. Remarkable demonstrations have been made by equipping bilateral, transhumeral amputees with the RP2009 arm developed by The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory team.

PY - 2008

Y1 - 2008

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84863809211&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84863809211&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1109/RBME.2008.2008231

DO - 10.1109/RBME.2008.2008231

M3 - Article

C2 - 22274896

AN - SCOPUS:84863809211

SN - 1937-3333

VL - 1

SP - 18

EP - 20

JO - IEEE reviews in biomedical engineering

JF - IEEE reviews in biomedical engineering

ER -