BrainCom - Information and Press Releases

BrainCom

LMU Press release: Schnittstelle zum Sprachzentrum

European Commission - Cordis

 

March 2017

BrainCom will develop a new generation of cortical implants for speech neural prostheses applications

• BrainCom is a FET Proactive project, funded by the European Commission with 8.35 M € for the next 5 years, with 10 Consortium members from Germany, Spain, France, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Luxembourg.

• Taking advantage of unique properties of novel nanomaterials such as graphene, 2D materials and organic semiconductors, BrainCom proposes a radically new technology of ultra-flexible cortical implants enabling stimulation and neural activity decoding over large brain areas with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.

• The results in BrainCom will permit significant advances in the understanding of the dynamics and neural information processing in cortical speech networks and the development of speech rehabilitation solutions using innovative brain-computer interfaces.

More than 5 million people worldwide suffer annually from aphasia, an extremely invalidating condition in which patients lose the ability to comprehend and formulate language after brain damage or in the course of neurodegenerative disorders. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), enabled by forefront technologies and materials, are a promising approach to treat patients with aphasia. The principle of BCIs is to collect neural activity at its source and decode it by means of electrodes implanted directly in the brain. However, neurorehabilitation of higher cognitive functions such as language raises serious issues. The current challenge is to design neural implants that cover sufficiently large areas of the brain to allow for reliable decoding of detailed neuronal activity distributed in various brain regions that are critical for language processing.

BrainCom is a FET Proactive project funded by the European Commission with 8.35 M € for the next 5 years. This interdisciplinary initiative involves 10 partners including technologists, engineers, biologists, clinicians, and ethics experts. They aim to develop a new generation of neuroprosthetic cortical devices enabling large-scale recordings and stimulation of cortical activity to study high level cognitive functions. Ultimately, the BrainCom project will seed a novel line of knowledge and technologies aimed at developing the future generation of speech neural prostheses. It will cover different levels of the value chain: from technology and engineering to basic and language neuroscience, and from preclinical research in animals to clinical studies in humans.

Recent developments show that it is possible to record cortical signals from a small region of the motor cortex and decode them to allow tetraplegic people to activate a robotic arm to perform everyday life actions. Brain-computer interfaces have also been successfully used to help tetraplegic patients unable to speak to communicate their thoughts by selecting letters on a computer screen using non-invasive electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. The performance of such technologies can be dramatically increased using more detailed cortical neural information.

BrainCom project proposes a radically new electrocorticography technology taking advantage of unique mechanical and electrical properties of novel nanomaterials such as graphene, 2D materials and organic semiconductors. The consortium members will fabricate ultra-flexible cortical and intracortical implants, which will be placed right on the surface of the brain, enabling high density recording and stimulation sites over a large area. This approach will allow the parallel stimulation and decoding of cortical activity with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.

LMU team led by Prof. Anton Sirota will contribute the critical translation between technology and neural prosthesis application. Using unprecedented resolution brain activity recording and perturbations tools in rodents LMU researchers will develop the foundation for extracting maximal information about functional dynamics in cortical circuits from rich surface and intra cortical signals, and based on this together with BrainCom colleagues will devise and test novel and more effective decoding strategies that are critical for speech neural prosthesis.

These technologies and research program will help to advance the basic understanding of cortical speech networks and to develop rehabilitation solutions to restore speech using innovative brain-computer paradigms. The technology innovations developed in the project will also find applications in the study of other high cognitive functions of the brain such as learning and memory, as well as other clinical applications such as epilepsy monitoring.

For further Information:
Prof. Anton Sirota
Chair of Cognition and Neural Plasticity
Biozentrum der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
sirota@biologie.uni-muenchen.de; 089/2180-74809