Lifeboat Foundation

A visual cortical prosthesis (VCP) has long been proposed as a strategy for restoring useful vision to the blind, under the assumption that visual percepts of small spots of light produced with electrical stimulation of visual cortex (phosphenes) will combine into coherent percepts of visual forms, like pixels on a video screen. We tested an alternative strategy in which shapes were traced on the surface of visual cortex by stimulating electrodes in dynamic sequence. In both sighted and blind participants, dynamic stimulation enabled accurate recognition of letter shapes predicted by the brain’s spatial map of the visual world. Forms were presented and recognized rapidly by blind participants, up to 86 forms per minute. These findings demonstrate that a brain prosthetic can produce coherent percepts of visual forms.

Schizophrenia is a devastating psychiatric disorder characterized by positive, negative and cognitive symptoms. While aberrant dopamine system function is typically associated with the positive symptoms of the disease, it is thought that this is secondary to pathology in afferent regions. Indeed, schizophrenia patients show dysregulated activity in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, two regions known to regulate dopamine neuron activity. These deficits in hippocampal and prefrontal cortical function are thought to result, in part, from reductions in inhibitory interneuron function in these brain regions. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that restoring interneuron function in the hippocampus and/or prefrontal cortex may be an effective treatment strategy for schizophrenia. In this article, we will discuss the evidence for interneuron pathology in schizophrenia and review recent advances in our understanding of interneuron development. Finally, we will explore how these advances have allowed us to test the therapeutic value of interneuron transplants in multiple preclinical models of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is devastating psychiatric disorder that affects approximately 1% of the population¹. Positive symptoms, such as paranoia, grandiosity, delusions, and hallucinations, are often the most striking features of the disorder; however, schizophrenia patients also display characteristic negative and cognitive symptoms, which can be severely debilitating. Negative symptoms, such as blunted affect, emotional withdrawal, and social avoidance and cognitive symptoms, including disruptions in working memory, attentional deficits, disorganized thought, and cognitive inflexibility, can negatively influence social and occupational functioning and diminish quality of life^2–4. Currently prescribed antipsychotic medications, which act as antagonists at the dopamine D2 receptor⁵, have been somewhat effective in treating the positive symptoms of schizophrenia⁶.

How will we interact with our electronic #devices in the #future? https://bit.ly/2Tm59F6

Touchscreens, keyboards and mice are the three dominant ways for us to interact with our devices in modern times. However, with the development of some new technologies (including #VoiceControl, #BrainComputerInterface, #brainwaves control, #gesture control, muscular signals interpretation and so forth), many start to ask: What will be the next way for us to talk to our machines?

Continue reading “How will we interact with our electronic devices in the future?” »

Temporary tattoo electrodes are the most recent development in the field of cutaneous sensors. They have successfully demonstrated their performances in the monitoring of various electrophysiological signals on the skin. These epidermal electronic devices offer a conformal and imperceptible contact with the wearer while enabling good quality recordings over time. Evaluations of brain activity in clinical practice face multiple limitations, where such electrodes can provide realistic technological solutions and increase diagnostics efficiency. Here we present the performance of inkjet-printed conducting polymer tattoo electrodes in clinical electroencephalography and their compatibility with magnetoencephalography. The working mechanism of these dry sensors is investigated through the modeling of the skin/electrode impedance for better understanding of the biosignals transduction at this interface. Furthermore, a custom-made skin phantom platform demonstrates the feasibility of high-density recordings, which are essential in localizing neuropathological activities. These evaluations provide valuable input for the successful application of these ultrathin electronic tattoos sensors in multimodal brain monitoring and diagnosis.

Circa 2019

Cerebral palsy is a condition that results from injuries or abnormalities of the brain, usually in the womb but occurring any time during 2 years after birth. It affects brain and nervous system functions such as thinking, seeing, hearing, learning and movement.

Continue reading “Stem Cell Therapy for Cerebral Palsy” »

In a study involving mice, researchers have determined that the amygdala, a part of the temporal lobe, could turn off pain signals in the brain. To learn more, click the link above and watch a video further explaining the functions of the amygdala.

Modeling and rendering of dynamic scenes is challenging, as natural scenes often contain complex phenomena such as thin structures, evolving topology, translucency, scattering, occlusion, and biological motion. Mesh-based reconstruction and tracking often fail in these cases, and other approaches (e.g., light field video) typically rely on constrained viewing conditions, which limit interactivity. We circumvent these difficulties by presenting a learning-based approach to representing dynamic objects inspired by the integral projection model used in tomographic imaging. The approach is supervised directly from 2D images in a multi-view capture setting and does not require explicit reconstruction or tracking of the object. Our method has two primary components: an encoder-decoder network that transforms input images into a 3D volume representation, and a differentiable ray-marching operation that enables end-to-end training. By virtue of its 3D representation, our construction extrapolates better to novel viewpoints compared to screen-space rendering techniques. The encoder-decoder architecture learns a latent representation of a dynamic scene that enables us to produce novel content sequences not seen during training. To overcome memory limitations of voxel-based representations, we learn a dynamic irregular grid structure implemented with a warp field during ray-marching. This structure greatly improves the apparent resolution and reduces grid-like artifacts and jagged motion. Finally, we demonstrate how to incorporate surface-based representations into our volumetric-learning framework for applications where the highest resolution is required, using facial performance capture as a case in point.

Video Player

A Duke University research team has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly control the animals’ sense of pain.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this brain center turns pain off, not on. It’s also located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety.

“People do believe there is a central place to relieve pain, that’s why placebos work,” said senior author Fan Wang, the Morris N. Broad Distinguished Professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine. “The question is where in the brain is the center that can turn off pain.”

A Duke University research team has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly control the animals’ sense of pain.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this brain center turns pain off, not on. It’s also located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety.

“People do believe there is a central place to relieve pain, that’s why placebos work,” said senior author Fan Wang, the Morris N. Broad Distinguished Professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine. “The question is where in the brain is the center that can turn off pain.”