Precision Neuroscience Raises $102 Million to Advance AI-Powered Brain Implant

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In breaking news, BCI startup Precision Neuroscience has raised over 100M USD to further develop their brain implant and progress in clinical trials!

Precision Neuroscience Corporation has developed an innovative thin film cortical surface electrode, akin to a high resolution version of ECG grids commonly used to diagnose and treat disorders such as epilepsy.  Importantly, they have developed a minimally invasive surgical process to implant (or later remove!) the electrodes, in theory reducing surgical and recovery time, and thus, decreasing patient risk.

This is an exciting development for the entire field, as it shows, along with Synchron-inc-, Neuralink, and Blackrock-neurotech, that the business community has confidence that Brain Computer Interfaces will imminently produce a positive impact on human health.

It is clear that the future of BCI will be big data combined with machine learning and innovative integration with the body.  The B-CRATOS project is also developing next generation BCI technologies with this in mind: wireless technologies to handle BIG neural data with low-power, wire-free implantable systems.

Find the full article here!

B-CRATOS on DEEPSYNC’s platform

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Since several months, the DEEPSYNC platform is online to give visibility to the Communities of Practices, their member projects and their stories.

It was a pleasure for B-CRATOS to be featured within the platform. In particular, our coordinator Robin Augustine was happy to contribute with his interview in which he explained the early stages of the project, the innovative aspects and the importance of the consortium, which is crucial for a complex project involving multiple technologies.

Find out more about the interview on the Deepsync platform!

Workshop in Gardanne on February 19th: programme available!

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Attend the Joint Workshop Neural Horizons: future panorama within Brain-Machine Interface on February 19th 2025 in Gardanne in the framework of the Braincoder Conference.

You can already find some information about the three sessions and their speakers and register at the event on this page.

Download the agenda here!

The Workshop Neural Horizons: future panorama within Brain-Machine Interface is on the BCI Society’s website

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The Joint Workshop Neural Horizons: future panorama within Brain-Machine Interface is now published on the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Society website. It will take place on 19th February, 2025 in Gardanne, France in the frame of the Braincoder Conference.

The B-CRATOS, HearLight and NEMO-BMI European projects are honoured to have the Workshop represented by this international organisation whose aim is “to foster research leading to technologies that enable people to interact with the world through brain signals”.

Thank you BCI Society for allowing us to contribute to your purpose and promote our research!

Please find further information on BCI Society’s website.

Keynote speaker – 2024 International Conference on Big Data Analytics in Bioinformatics

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Robin Augustine from Uppsala University was a keynote speaker at the 2024 International Conference on Big Data Analytics in Bioinformatics (DABCon) in Kolkata – India.

He presented his work with his talk on “Fat – Intra Body Communication: A new paradigm for intra-body communication technology enabling reinstatement of lost functionalities in human”.

It was good opportunity to exchange with experts on the subject and to showcase B-CRATOS!

Video overview of the event: *Narula Institute | of Technology Inaugurates 3-Day | International Conference on Big Data Analytics

Website: Dabcon | NIT | Home

Discover and register now for the Joint Workshop in Gardanne

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On 19th February, 2025 a significant joint workshop organised by three major leaders in Brain-Machine Interfaces will take place in Gardanne, France. This workshop is a setellite event of the Braincoder conference.

The agenda will include speakers among the B-CRATOS partners and experts from the Institut Pasteur, the CEA-Clinatec and the EPFL.

More information in the event page

You can register here!

 

 

 

Controlling prosthetic hands more precisely by the power of thought

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B-CRATOS is excited to announce the publication of the paper Accurate neural control of a hand prosthesis by posture-related activity in the primate grasping circuit, co-written principally by our partner Andres Agudelo-Toro and Hans Scherberger. This was a multi-year effort to decode the principles of grasping actions in the brain.

Andres, a neuro-engineer at DPZ, worked with primates and collaborators in Canada and Taiwan to achieve this breakthrough towards improving BCIs. This paper – published in Neuron on 16 October 2024 – presented for the first time the neural control of the posture of a multidimensional prosthetic hand, paving the way for future interfaces exploiting this additional information channel.

For further information, please refer to the full article and the press release published by our partner Deutsches Primatenzentrum GmbH!

B-CRATOS Consortium Meeting in Lyon

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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!

Synchron Announces Positive Results from U.S. COMMAND Study of Endovascular Brain-Computer Interface

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In a major step forward for next-generation implantable BCI devices, Synchron has just announced positive safety results from their COMMAND clinical trial, reporting no serious adverse events in brain/vasculature of the 6 patients enrolled over 12 months!  Impressively, surgeries had a median deployment time of 20 minutes, demonstrating a major advantage of the Stentrode technology.  And importantly, the trial demonstrated efficacy, showing that motoric brain activity was captured and transformed to digital control signals.

The Synchron system is a great example of thinking outside of the box to go beyond the current state of the art and enable BCI systems to be potentially safer, longer lasting, and easier to deploy.  The future of BCI is arriving and will be made possible by next generation technologies, whether it is novel electrodes like the Stentrode or improvements in wireless implantable technologies, such as those being advanced by our B-CRATOS project, among others.

Find the full article here!

B-CRATOS at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience 2024

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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.