On 16 and 17 October 2024, the B-CRATOS consortium was invited to hold its Consortium Meeting near Lyon, à Romanèche-Thorins. After a warm welcome by Paul Wanda and Cyril Beguet, our colleagues from Blackrock Microsystems Europe and organisers of the whole event, we started our discussions on the project status and the objectives for the coming months.

It was also a very important opportunity for all of us to see the demo system bench, a significant step for the development of B-CRATOS: after several minutes of tweaking and a bit of background stress, BME and NTNU managed to get it working and impress all the partners present!

They were two very intense days that included many debates on the following steps but also the needs of a possible extension of B-CRATOS. All with the wise advice of our Advisory Board members!

Thanks to all the partners present for their contribution and a special thank you to Blackrock for welcoming us warmly and organising the event down to the last detail, letting us discover this region of France and many of its peculiarities!

In October 2024, our partners from DPZ participated at the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago. It was a great opportunity for them to share their research and experience with scientists from all over the world.

The poster they presented was Training of real-time robotic grasp decoding from neuronal population activity in macaque motor cortex (M1). It concerned with the primate cortex which can be viewed as a closed-loop dynamical system with very high dimensionality. Extracting a sub-sample of this activity and using it for the decoding of any encoded intention is a challenging task by virtue of the size of the sample relative to the full population. The problem is amplified by the brain’s plasticity, which renders any effort towards decoding ephemeral.

Here they employed a modified Kalman filter to decode the grip of a robotic hand from population spiking activity recorded from two 64 channel Utah arrays implanted in the hand area of primary motor cortex (area M1) of a macaque monkey. Their results confirm that a modified Kalman Filter is suitable to successfully translate cortical activity to motor commands of a robot hand in real time. They also demonstrate the gradual learning by observation and internalization of the task by the monkey using two metrics – the reduction in the transitory nature of the decoder and the speed of the transfer of control of the prosthesis to the monkey. In early experimental sessions, the monkey was slow to take over control and the decoder required retraining within the experiment session, whereas in later sessions decoder training was required only at the beginning of the session and transfer of control was rapid. Furthermore, decoder training involved not only the training of the decoder on the neural activity, but it also adapted brain activity on the decoder, and an equilibrium had to be maintained between the learning processes. This equilibrium was achieved faster and maintained more robustly as the monkey became more proficient in the task, hence demonstrating the viability of this learning-by-observation paradigm.

BCI Pioneer (and 2024 B-CRATOS Webinar participant) Ian Burkhart has recently co-authored a comprehensive review of clinical trials for implantable BCI in Nature Reviews Bioengineering!

Importantly, Ian and his co-authors not only review the history of BCI trials, but provide valuable insights regarding a pathway forward regarding patient ethics, a need for BCI standards, diversity in recruited volunteers, and other needs/barriers for progress.  The truly leave no stone unturned in covering everything from patient participants to research groups to technologies to the practicality of future clinical products.

And given Ian’s unique position as a former implantable BCI study participant, such perspective is invaluable for the field.  We expect this review to be a core resource for those wishing to better understand the history, present, and future of the field.

The review nicely compiles a list of emerging electrodes as of December 2023, and one notes the ever-growing number of data channels these devices aim to collect.  One can imagine that with multiple such devices implanted, we will see exponential increases in the amount and complexity of data collected in BCI of the future.   To take advantage of the full potential of such data, we will need next-generation wireless technologies capable of transmitting it for analysis and storage.  At B-CRATOS, we aim to develop such technologies to bring big data BCI systems to impactful real-world applications through improved integration within the body and to devices outside of it.  We also expect that by developing next-gen wireless technologies for implantable systems, patient acceptance, usability, and safety can be greatly improved over current systems.

Find the full article here!