Last fall, Jeffrey Lin, an advanced biotechnology research officer at the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), introduced a challenging project to neuroscientists to develop implants for repairing veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries. Device, memory damage, the project totaled 40 million US dollars, Ling said: "Is there enough money to meet the challenge?"
Recently, DARPA announced that two academic groups located at the University of California, Los Angeles are ready to conduct research for this purpose. (UCLA), another group is from the University of Pennsylvania (Pen). Both groups hope to use electrical stimulation to "brighten" brain areas that are closely related to memory. The US Energy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under the equipment manufacturer Medtronic will also participate in research and development of stimulators that are more than 10 times smaller than existing neurostimulators. The scale of this research is not small, but the University of California, Los Angeles received 15 million U.S. dollars for the four-year study, while the University of Pennsylvania received 22.5 million U.S. dollars for the same four-year study, but worried about the prospects of the project. Someone does this. Skeptical. According to James Samowski, a neuropsychologist at the Kessler Foundation. Repair surgery. Neuroscientist Michael Kahana is the head of the pen team. Researchers say that some of these patients need to cover their brains with hundreds of electrodes, wait a few weeks for them to get sick again, and then decide which brain area to start. deal with. In this way, researchers can accurately map brain activity and understand electrophysiological knowledge related to memory protection and repair. Electronic records can also help researchers better understand memory disorders. Many people with epilepsy suffer from memory loss.
Kahana hopes to build a computer model by studying how to search and store electronic biomarkers in normal and damaged brains. If the patient's memory is disturbed, the computer model can detect and repair it immediately. Kahana's team detected patterns of brain activity signals related to memory encoding and storage. They will soon release the first brain signals related to memory repair. "The early results are very exciting."
The UCLA team is led by neurosurgeon Itzak Fried, who uses a variety of methods to develop memory generation models. Fried’s early work was to treat patients with epilepsy, but we found that electrical stimulation of the entorhinal cortex of the patient’s brain can improve the level of computer games. In the game, they need to play the role of a taxi driver and quickly remember and remember where to park the car in the virtual city so that passengers can get off. Now, using the data from this study, Fried has devised a method to stimulate the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus (another area that plays a key role in memory) in patients with traumatic brain injury. Support patients in the field of cooperation to transform daily life experiences into long-term memories. If these attempts are successful, it will eventually be expected to allow researchers to carry out the first phase of clinical trials, implanting deep brain stimulators for patients with head injuries. However, Sumowski pointed out that researchers can use epilepsy as a model for research, but excessive reliance on the model can cause research problems. Patients with brain trauma do not always match the performance of patients with mental disorders, and the patterns of brain atrophy and encephalopathy in patients with epilepsy are completely different from the former. Rogeredondo, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that the success of the project depends largely on the damage to the patient’s brain. If you still have memory, but it is difficult to connect and search, electrical stimulation is an effective method. However, if the memory connection is not established or is completely damaged, the embedded device will not perform any operations.
Edondo found it difficult to determine which units are associated with the memory, and it is even more difficult to use electrical stimulation for precise debugging to help repair damaged memory. "The structure of the human brain and hippocampus is very complex. A slight change in voltage on the microelectrodes can cause the loss of neuronal control several times, even if the affected area is small." Yes. But researchers focused on the symptoms of mental illness. For example, research on Parkinson's disease and obsessive-compulsive disorder has affected Kahana. Studies have shown that researchers can effectively treat these diseases even if they do not fully understand how electrical stimulation changes brain circuits at the cellular level. Memory biomarkers in patients with epilepsy can be used as indicators to restore the damaged brain to normal. Justin Sanchez, director of the DARPA Recovery Activity Memory Project (RAM), said that RAM faces a huge challenge. AM is part of the Human Brain Research (BRAIN) program, which uses advanced and innovative neurotechnology established by the US government for US$110 million. Currently, 270,000 soldiers have returned to the United States from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan and have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries. Therefore, scientific progress and technological innovation are urgently needed to overcome these difficulties. "Compared with existing treatment technologies, our research is a pioneering new method."