Event Details:
Continue the conversation: Join the speaker for a complimentary dinner in the Theory Center (second floor of the neurosciences building) after the seminar
Restoring hope and hand movement to humans with paralysis with a biomimetic brain-computer interface: Opportunities and challenges
Abstract
The greatest desire for most people with high-level spinal cord injury is for restored hand movement. My lab developed an intracortical brain-computer interface (iBCI) in monkeys that used recordings of single neurons in the motor cortex to make predictions of muscle activity. These, in turn, we used to control Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) of the muscles of the monkey’s hand, which were temporarily paralyzed by a peripheral nerve block. This FES iBCI allowed the monkeys to voluntarily control not only the movement of their fingers, but also to exert graded force on grasped objects. This “biomimetic” iBCI allowed more nearly natural control of hand movement than is possible with other existing iBCIs. In this talk, I will describe the basic work that led to our proof-of-concept in monkeys, and our further development of wireless versions of the FES iBCI applicable to a broader range of the activities of daily living. We have examined the representation in M1, of a broad range of behaviors, including both well-learned, stereotyped movements in the lab, and the more natural grasping movements related to food retrieval and locomotion in the monkey’s home cage. These different motor actions occupy different regions of neural state space, have dimensionality ~50% larger than do the lab behaviors, and are somewhat more nonlinear. As a consequence, simple linear decoders of EMG fail. I will describe the novel approach we have recently taken to solve this problem, as well our most recent efforts to translate this technology to humans.
Lee Miller
Northwestern University
Lee E. Miller is a Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. He received the Ph.D. degree in Physiology from Northwestern University in 1989, then completed two years of postdoctoral training in the Department of Medical Physics, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2016 and was the president of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement from 2015 - 2023. Dr. Miller has had a career-long interest in the motor and sensory signals that are generated by single neurons in the brains of monkeys during arm and hand movement. His early work was devoted to studying these signals in the brainstem, cerebral cortex, and cerebellum, and their relation to muscle activity. In the past 20 years, Dr. Miller’s lab has increasingly focused on translational research, in particular, the development of intracortical brain computer interface technology to restore limb movement to paralyzed patients. His interdisciplinary approach has led to productive collaborations locally, nationally, and internationally. Most recently he has begun working with humans with spinal cord injury as part of the Cortical Bionics Research Group. He has authored over 140 manuscripts, book chapters, and review articles.
Hosted by Sabrina Liu (see profile below)
Note: This seminar was rescheduled from it's original date, January 27, 2025.
About the Mind, Brain, Computation, and Technology (MBCT) Seminar Series
The Stanford Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology (MBCT) Seminars explore ways in which computational and technical approaches are being used to advance the frontiers of neuroscience.
The series features speakers from other institutions, Stanford faculty, and senior training program trainees. Seminars occur about every other week, and are held at 4:00 pm on Mondays at the Cynthia Fry Gunn Rotunda - Stanford Neurosciences E-241.
Questions? Contact neuroscience@stanford.edu
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