DARPA-grant for intelligent spinal interface development
Brown University scientists, surgeons from Rhode Island Hospital & private partners will develop and to test a device which aims at bridging the gap in neural circuitry created by spinal cord injury, in the hope of restoring the muscle control and sensation.
This project is supported by a new grant of $6.3 million from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A research team led by Brown University researchers will develop and test an “intelligent spinal interface” which aims at helping to restore limb movement and bladder control for people who have suffered spinal cord injuries.
Developed in collaboration with surgeons at Rhode Island Hospital, Lifespan partner along with its commercial partners at Intel & Micro-Leads Medical, the experimental spinal interface will be designed in order to bridge the gap in neural circuitry, that is created by a spinal injury, the scientists said. The main idea is to record signals traveling down the spinal cord above an injury site and to use them in order to drive electrical spinal stimulation below the lesion. At the same time, information that is coming up the cord from below will be used to drive stimulation above
the injury. This device could potentially help to restore both volitional control of limb muscles as well as feeling & sensation lost due to injury.David Borton who is an assistant professor at Brown’s School of Engineering & a researcher at the University Carney Institute for Brain Science who will lead the project, said the circuits around a spinal lesion often remain active and functional; the hope is that by using information from either side of a lesion in a bidirectional way, the team may make a significant impact on the treatment of these spinal cord injuries. The exploratory study aims to build the toolset i.e, the mix of hardware, software and functional understanding of the spinal cord, to make such a system possible., he added.
Over the next 2 years, the team will work with Dr. Jared Fridley & the Rhode Island Hospital neurosurgery staff to recruit volunteers with any spinal cord injuries that to be implanted with an experimental interface period of up to twenty-nine days. This device will record and stimulate the spine as patients participate in standard physical therapy for spinal injuries.
It is a transformational effort that has the potential to have a significant impact on the lives of individuals with spinal cord injury, particularly for the veterans with war-related spinal cord damage, said Dr. Ziya Gokaslan who is the neurosurgeon-in-chief at Rhode Island & Miriam hospitals, clinical director of Lifespan’s Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute & chair of neurosurgery Brown’s Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown. Dr. Gokaslan further added that the team is very excited to be a part of this very innovative research study, which is the result of a partnership between the brilliant scientists led by Dr. Borton at Brown and the team at Rhode Island Hospital as well as their industry collaborators.
The scientists will focus on signals related to control of the legs for walking & standing as well as signals related to the bladder control, the latter of which is the main concern reported by patients with spinal cord injuries. And by the end of the two-year project, the team hopes to demonstrate that this device can properly target the neural circuits which influence these activities.
Borton said that the team hopes that by exploring what signals are generated by the spinal cord, how these are related to activities of daily living & how electrical modulation of the spinal cord impacts these signals and its future designs of therapeutic technologies.
You are reading DARPA-grant for intelligent spinal interface development
A recent research study led by Borton and by teams in the U.S. and Switzerland has shown that the spinal cord stimulation can help in restoring voluntary muscle control after the spinal injury, potentially aiding in rehabilitation. The new project aims to build on the success of prior efforts using signals from the spinal cord to drive stimulation in a way that more closely resembles natural signaling processes. Along with this, by making the stimulation bi-directional, this could also aid in the recovery of sensations from limbs & muscles below the injury site, as well as evolve its stimulation profile over time.
Borton said what is new in this project is, it takes information from the spinal cord itself and use the same to that to drive stimulation to another part of the spinal cord; In this way, the team is taking advantage of as much intact tissue as they can, which they think could lead to open the door to wider therapeutic application of spinal cord stimulation, for example, bladder control.
A key portion of this project is developing AI & machine learning tools in order to decode spinal signals recorded from the spine. To achieve this, the Brown team will work with scientists from Intel, which will actually provide hardware, software & research support for the project. Formerly through projects like the BrainGate collaboration, Brown researchers have done pioneering work in this area. This new project will surely build on that success.
Naveen Rao, the corporate vice president & general manager of the AI Products Group at Intel, said that as a Ph.D. student at Brown, he investigated how to interface the brain with machines as an application. Now at Intel, they are combining their Artificial Intelligence expertise with Brown University’s cutting-edge medical research study to help solve a critical medical problem: how to reconnect the brain & spine after a major spinal injury.
Thomas Serre who is an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown, will work with the Artificial Intelligence team from Intel. Serre, as an expert in computer vision, brings expertise in using an understanding of a biological system in designing artificial analogs.
Serre said their goal is to figure out mathematical abstractions that they can then integrate with modern machine learning architectures. he added that hope is that if they could design the models with some knowledge of how the spinal cord works, they will be able to develop systems that are efficient, generalizable & that can learn with less training.
This project will actually make use of a high-resolution spinal cord stimulation technology developed by Micro-Leads, called HD64. Bryan McLaughlin, the founder & chief executive officer of Micro-Leads Medical, said for many years, spinal cord stimulators have led to many unpredictable clinical outcomes due to an inherent difficulty with localizing therapies to only a particular part of the body that need it specifically. His team developed HD64 to provide a 2-times increase in the number of therapy locations & greater pinpointing accuracy without changing the size of the implantable device or the number of wires.
In this first two year phase of the project, the device will make use of an external computer system in order to decode spinal signals. However, the team hopes that this project will lay the groundwork for a fully implantable device for long-term use during rehabilitation and beyond.
Borton said that the team is confident that what they learn in this program will inform future refinement of this system that will have a real impact on rehabilitation from spinal cord injuries.
Lifespan & Rhode Island Hospital is proud to collaborate with Brown University & tech industry partners on this breakthrough technology treatment endeavor, at the leading edge of neurosciences research, said Timothy J. Babineau, M.D., president, and CEO of Lifespan. Their deep commitment to the neurosciences & to advancing clinical research compels their investment in this exciting work, and no group of surgeons could be more suited to this work than their world-renowned neurosurgery team, he added.
Editor’s Note: DARPA-grant for intelligent spinal interface development, Brown University scientists, surgeons from Rhode Island Hospital & private partners, DARPA-grant of $6.3 million for intelligent spinal interface.
