implant

In the new research, the Stanford team wanted to know if neurons in the motor cortex contained useful information about speech movements, too. That is, could they detect how “subject T12” was trying to move her mouth, tongue, and vocal cords as she attempted to talk? These are small, subtle movements, and according to Sabes, one big discovery is that just a few neurons contained enough information to let a computer program predict, with good accuracy, what words the patient was trying to say. That information was…

While islet cell transplants allow some diabetics to forgo daily insulin injections, those people have to take immunosuppressive drugs in order to keep the cells from being rejected. A new implant, however, could administer the drugs for them – and with fewer side effects.In Type 1 diabetes, the islet cells produced by the pancreas are destroyed by an autoimmune reaction. They therefore aren't available to travel via the bloodstream to the liver, where they would have produced blood-sugar-regulating insulin.As a result,…

First of all, Elon Musk is once again making promises that he probably can't keep.The billionaire has now made what is likely his most ambitious commercial promise to date. In the past, he has predicted that Tesla's Cybertruck would go into production this year (spoiler alert: it didn't) and that he would create his own smartphone if necessary (spoiler alert: he probably won't). It is said that research on human volunteers will soon begin at Musk's biotech firm Neuralink, which develops brain chips to restore function to…

The installation of a cochlear implant is a tricky procedure, in which certain nerves may be damaged if the surgeon isn't sufficiently careful. A new "smart" surgical drill is designed to help, by automatically shutting off if it gets too close to those nerves.The device is designed for use with an existing image-guided, robotic-assisted system, in which the implant is inserted into the inner ear through a narrow channel that's drilled in the skull. That channel has to be very precisely located, as it must pass through a…

The novel approach combines traditional chemotherapy drugs with a new method of tumor irradiation.A combination of internal radiation and chemotherapy dissolves tumors in 80% of mice across multiple models.Duke University biomedical engineers have demonstrated the most effective pancreatic cancer treatment yet recorded in mouse models. While most mouse trials consider just stopping growth to be a success, the new treatment fully eliminated tumors in 80% of mice across many model types, including those considered to be the…

PTI San Francisco, December 2 Tech billionaire Elon Musk said his Neuralink company is seeking permission to test its brain implant in people soon. In a “show and tell” presentation livestreamed on Wednesday night, Musk said his team is in the process of asking US regulators to allow them to test the device. He said he thinks the company should be able to put the implant in a human brain as part of a clinical trial in about six…

Image: Nick_ Raille_07 / Shutterstock.comElon Musk says his brain computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink is almost ready to start human trials, possibly by the middle of 2023.  At an event that appeared to be another recruitment drive for Neuralink, Musk – chief of Tesla, Space X, and owner of Twitter – said the BCI startup could put one of its devices in a person's head in six months' time, meaning at some point in 2023. Musk previously hoped to have done that by 2020. Since 2017, the firm has been working on an…

Recently, a group in Spain, using an implant called the Utah array, which has 96 electrodes, found that that a blind woman could use such a system attached to her brain to make out letters. In its prior events, Neuralink has followed somewhat cautiously in the footsteps of other neuroscientists. For instance, in 2021, it showed a video of a monkey playing the video game Pong with its brain. However, a human with a brain implant had already played the game 15 years before. Instead of entirely new applications, what's…

When a limb is rendered immobile for long periods of time, its muscles will inevitably begin to atrophy. A new implant could help keep that from happening, however, by mechanically stretching and compressing those muscles.Developed by scientists at Harvard University, the experimental device is known as MAGENTA, which stands for "mechanically active gel-elastomer-nitinol tissue adhesive."Running lengthwise through the implant is a spring made of nitinol. The latter is a shape-memory alloy that will temporarily stay at one…

A paralyzed man who cannot speak or type was able to spell out over 1,000 words using a neuroprosthetic device that translates his brain waves into full sentences, US researchers said Tuesday."Anything is possible," was one of the man's favorite phrases to spell out, said the first author of a new study on the research, Sean Metzger of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).Last year, the team of UCSF researchers showed that a brain implant called a brain-computer interface could translate 50 very common words…