New frontiers from neurotechnology to reduce the impacts of epilepsy. A flower-shaped cranial implant “opens” to stimulate areas of the brain affected by the condition. Be careful though, the device has so far only been tested on small animals; the premises are good but research and experimental studies on humans are not yet so close
If technological innovation, in Science, has a goal, it is certainly to improve people’s living conditions. Without the advance of technology today we would not have methods to combat once deadly diseases, to allow those affected by limiting pathological situations to have longer life expectancies or to obtain faster and more precise screenings than in the past. Every single step that scientific research takes is a conquest for man and a good for humanity. The work carried out by a team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, led by the neurotechnology expert Stephanie Lacour, cannot be interpreted otherwise. a difficult but possible goal: to forget about epilepsy forever. Let me be clear: here no one will ever be able to prevent the disease from affecting people of any age or gender but the “promise” is to literally make people forget its consequences and let patients carry out their daily activities as if nothing had happened, or almost.
The heart of the Swiss project, recently published in Science, is a very small cranial implant, which is inspired by a flower for its functioning. Once inserted near the brain, thanks to a tiny hole, it can open delicately, just like a flower, to stimulate the neurons interested in activating the neurological condition that causes death with a still very high percentage. For example, in Switzerland itself, over 100 deaths a year from epilepsy are estimated.
The neurotechnology project
A structure of cortical electrodes stimulates, records or monitors electrical activity in the brain for patients suffering from epilepsy conditions. The disorder is known to cause seizures, which are bursts of electrical activity in the brain and can cause uncontrollable tremors, sudden stiffness, collapse, and other symptoms. Although the use of microelectrodes dates back decades, the possibility of supplementation is recent, approved by the US FDA only in recent years. An approval that has led to the creation of solutions that are not exactly “comfortable” for patients, from blemishes to actual operations for on-site installation. And hence the work of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Researchers have created a super-thin flower-shaped device that can be bent enough to fit into a 2-centimeter hole in the skull. In this way, it can be placed by a robot in a tiny and delicate area, occupying only 1 millimeter of width. Once deployed, the flexible electrode releases each of its six spiral arms, one by one, to stretch across a region of the brain about 4 centimeters in diameter. In this way, comes into contact with the neurons involved in epileptic “seizures”, to manage them and, if necessary, mitigate their effects.
Other devices may require a hole in the skull the same size as the diameter of the electrode array.
“The beauty of the eversion mechanism is that we can deploy an arbitrary electrode size with minimal, constant compression on the brain,” said Sukho Song, lead author of the study. «The community has shown great interest in this mechanism because it is bio-inspired. That is, it can emulate the growth of tree roots without setting limits in terms of extension».
Rather like a butterfly squeezed inside its cocoon before metamorphosis, the electrode array, complete with its spiral arms, is carefully folded inside a cylindrical tube, i.e. the charger, ready to be deployed across the small hole in the skull.
Each leg contains soft, microfabricated electrodes and strain sensors for real-time implementation monitoring. In a proof-of-concept surgery, a robotic electrode array was successfully deployed on the cortex of a piglet to record sensory cortical activity.
“This neurotechnology opens up promising avenues for minimally invasive cortical surgery and applications related to neurological disorders such as motor and sensory deficits,” they say from Switzerland. The device, however, is not yet ready for the human brain – having only been tested in animals – but will continue to be developed by a spin-off from EPFL’s Laboratory for Bioelectronic Interfaces called ‘Neurosoft Bioelectronics’.
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