Gerwin Schalk - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Signals from the brain can provide a new communication channel - a brain-computer interface (BCI) - for people with severe neuromuscular disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brainstem stroke, cerebral palsy, and spinal cord injury. BCI technology can allow people who are completely paralyzed, or "locked in," to express wishes to caregivers, use word processing programs, access the Internet, or even operate neuroprostheses. Up to now, BCI research has demonstrated that a variety of different methods using different brain signals, different signal analyses, and different operating formats can convey a person's commands to a computer. Future progress that moves from this demonstration stage to practical applications of long-term value to people with motor disabilities requires systematic comparison and integration of these different methods. This process can be greatly facilitated by a flexible general-purpose BCI system that can be used to implement any BCI design. Over the past five years, we have developed such a system, called BCI2000, and we have provided it to 63 laboratories around the world. They are using it for a wide variety of studies. The goal of this application is the further development and maintenance of BCI2000 to ensure its continuing and growing utility to the rapidly growing field of BCI research. Our laboratory has been in the forefront of BCI research for over 15 years. We initiated and are leading the interdisciplinary and multinational development of BCI2000. The aims of this proposal are: (1) to make BCI2000 more adaptable to other users' needs and other technologies to ensure its continuing utility as those needs and technologies change; (2) to exploit this increased flexibility by incorporating into BCI2000 support for other hardware, software, and operating systems; and (3) to develop and maintain complete BCI2000 documentation and user support to allow efficient use of BCI2000 by a larger user base. We expect that achievement of these aims and dissemination of the resulting technology to other research groups will greatly facilitate BCI research and accelerate its ongoing transition from laboratory demonstrations to realization of BCI applications with clear practical value for people with motor disabilities. LAY LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION: Many recent studies have shown that people who are severely paralyzed can use brain signals alone to communicate their intent to a computer. The brain-computer interface (BCI) technology that makes this possible requires further development before it can be widely used. This project will greatly facilitate this development by improving and maintaining general-purpose BCI software and continuing to provide it to BCI research groups throughout the world. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Signals from the brain can provide non-muscular communication and control channels, or brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), to people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brainstem stroke, cerebral palsy, or spinal cord injury. BCIs can allow people who are severely paralyzed, or even "locked in," to use brain signals to write, communicate with others, control their environments, access the Internet, or operate neuroprostheses. The realization of clinically useful BCI systems requires work in three areas: (1) acquisition of brain signals;(2) signal processing;and (3) clinical implementation. Because these areas involve very different disciplines, research groups usually focus on only one area. Thus, at the beginning of this BRP, despite the exciting achievements of researchers around the world, the field had progressed only to the point of laboratory demonstrations, in large part because achievements in one area were not integrated with those in others. In the past grant period, this BRP changed that landscape. First, it developed and disseminated to more than 160 research groups a general-purpose BCI software platform, called BCI2000, that facilitates all aspects of interdisciplinary BCI research and development, from laboratory to home. Furthermore, it used BCI2000 to develop the first BCI system designed for independent home use, and successfully tested this prototype in long-term home use by a small group of people severely disabled by ALS. Building on this work, the goal of this renewal proposal is to establish the first vertically-integrated BCI research and development program, and use it to produce BCI systems that are fully practical for independent use in clinical and home settings. The proposed program extends from signal acquisition, to signal processing, to application development and clinical implementation. By including and coordinating the activities and achievements in these different areas, this program will create and validate the first BCI systems suitable for widespread independent use by people with severe motor disabilities. Each BRP partner is in the forefront of one or more of the essential research areas, from hardware design to clinical testing. In limited ways, they already collaborate with one another. Working closely together and implementing new ideas, they will: (1) improve signal acquisition by developing more reliable, robust, and convenient chronic methods for recording electroencephalographic activity (EEG) and for exploring the BCI capabilities of electrocorticography (ECoG);(2) optimize adaptive feature extraction and translation algorithms for these signals;and (3) incorporate the results into BCI systems that are fully practical for home and clinical settings and establish the value of these systems for daily use by people with severe motor disabilities. By achieving these aims, disseminating the resulting technology, and providing other researchers access to its vertically-integrated framework, this BRP program should enable BCI research to produce BCIs that actually improve the lives of people with severe motor disabilities. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can restore communication and control to people severely paralyzed or even "locked-in" by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brainstem stroke, cerebral palsy, or other devastating neuromuscular disorders. The goal of this Bioengineering Research Partnership proposal is to establish the first comprehensive BCI research and development program and use it to produce the first BCI systems suitable for widespread independent home use by people with severe motor disabilities.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Neurological disorders affect many millions of people in the United States and throughout the world. Recent advances enable the development of adaptive neurotechnologies, powerful new technologies that interact with the nervous system to promote functional recovery. These technologies are inherently multidisciplinary: they involve neuroscience, biomedical engineering, electrical and computer science, signal processing, and clinical, ethical, and commercial domains. Very few people can function effectively across all these ?elds. As a result, only a few of these technologies have been fully developed and translated into clinical practice, and still fewer are widely used. The goal of this Short Course s to address this problem by providing a new group of leaders with the broad multidisciplinary knowledge needed to plan, develop, and implement the next generation of adaptive neurotechnologies. The Wadsworth scientists and engineers of the newly established National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies propose to create and conduct, together with additional external faculty, a comprehensive four- week Short Course in the theory and practice of adaptive neurotechnologies. This Course has three aims. Aim 1 will provide lectures in the ?ve areas critical to understanding and implementing adaptive neurotechnologies: basic neuroscience (with emphasis on the most relevant regions and functions); engineering (how technologies monitor the nervous system and interact with it); current adaptive neurotechnologies (capabilities, limitations, future prospects); clinical translation (target populations, trial design); and commercial, regulatory, ethical, and other factors important to dissemination and use of these technologies. Aim 2 will complement the lectures of Aim 1 with hands-on Training Exercises in which participants use the principles conveyed in the lectures and the software platform BCI2000 to design and implement three representative adaptive neurotechnologies. Aim 3 will disseminate the curriculum to the larger research and development community by providing lecture syllabi and videos online and publishing video journal articles for the Training Exercises. It will also gather formal and informal feedback from participants and others to guide improvements in the Course. This uniquely focused multidisciplinary curriculum will enable the participants to become independent and active agents in developing, evaluating, and using adaptive neurotechnologies, and in bringing others into this rapidly growing ?eld. To enhance the long-term impact of the Course, wide publicity and a careful selection process will recruit 24 participants who are or are likely to become leaders of laboratory, clinical, or commercial research and development programs in this ?eld. In summary, this intensive Short Course will empower the next generation of scientists, engineers, and clinicians to transform promising laboratory developments and concepts into real-world systems, methods, and applications that address important scienti?c and clinical problems.

Recent scienti?c and technical advances enable the development of systems for creating novel interactions with the central nervous system (CNS) that can induce bene?cial plasticity. These systems, called adaptive neurotechnologies, measure signals from the CNS, derive from these signals the state of the CNS, and adaptively provide feedback that can restore, replace, enhance, supplement or improve CNS functions impaired by injury or disease. Thus, they can provide powerful new therapies for stroke, head or spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy, and other devastating disorders. For example, they can restore communication to people who have lost muscle control, and they can enhance functional recovery for people with spinal cord injury or stroke. The development of these technologies is impeded by the need for research groups to create specialized real-time software, which is usually a lengthy, dif?cult, expensive, and sometimes impractical task. Thus, realization of these new technologies could be greatly facilitated by a robust and ?exible software platform that supports complex real-time interactions with the CNS throughout the development process, from the laboratory through clinical testing. The goal of this proposal is to create this platform. The central hypothesis is that, by creating this new platform and giving it to scientists, engineers, and clinicians, this software platform will accelerate realization of adaptive neurotechnologies that reduce the devastating impact of neurological disorders. This hypothesis is supported by the investigators' past experience and success in creating and disseminating BCI2000, a software platform for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), one category of adaptive neurotechnologies. BCI2000 has supported scienti?c and clinical studies reported in over 1000 papers. This proposed project will transform BCI2000 into BCI2000+, a hardened, expanded, easy-to-use, and fully documented software platform for a broad range of adaptive neurotechnologies. Aim 1 will create a reliable, fail-safe, and fault-tolerant architecture, produce new functionalities for multimodal signal acquisition, real-time processing and output generation, and user extensions. Aim 2 will produce new graphical tools for rapid system prototyping, advanced signal and data visualization, comprehensive user-appropriate documentation, and auxiliary tools for data management and of?ine analysis. BCI2000+ will be optimized and validated through extensive in-lab testing and through beta testing by other groups. Achievement of these aims will produce BCI2000+, a software platform that supports new adaptive neurotech- nologies from initial laboratory studies through clinical testing. This robust, ?exible, and easily adopted platform should encourage scientists, engineers, and clinicians to join in this exciting work; it should foster a collaborative environment that enables diverse investigators to work together and complement each other. In sum, the work proposed here will accelerate realization of novel adaptive neurotechnologies that enable scienti?c investigation and improve treatment for stroke, brain and spinal cord injury, and other devastating neurological disorders.

The central nervous system (CNS) changes throughout life, and its interactions with the world produce activity- dependent plasticity that enables it to acquire and maintain useful behaviors. Recent scienti?c and technical advances support the development of systems that create novel interactions with the CNS that can induce and guide bene?cial plasticity. These systems, called adaptive neurotechnologies, measure signals from the CNS and concurrent behavior, derive from those signals the state of the CNS, and adaptively provide real-time feedback that can restore, replace, enhance, supplement or improve CNS functions impaired by injury or disease. Thus, they can provide important new therapies for neurological disorders. The development and use of adaptive neurotechnologies is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor. The integration of knowledge and ideas from these diverse areas, and their implementation by highly sophisticated software/hardware systems, requires substantial time, effort, and multidisciplinary expertise. This slows progress in research and development of adaptive neurotechnologies and limits the number of groups that are successful in realizing these technologies. The present proposal seeks to address these two major problems. Over the past 18 years, we have developed and disseminated a software platform, called BCI2000, that supports interactions with the CNS and can implement a wide range of adaptive neurotechnologies. To date, we have provided it to more than 6,000 users worldwide who have used it to support experiments described in over 1,200 peer-reviewed publications. Despite this demonstrated value, BCI2000 adoption is limited by the requirements of substantial programming expertise and in-depth understanding of BCI2000 concepts needed to adapt and integrate BCI2000 into the speci?c experimental protocols and hardware technologies of a particular laboratory. Thus, most research groups cannot take advantage of the advantages provided by BCI2000. We propose to address this de?ciency by simplifying the task of con?guring BCI2000 for all major classes of adaptive neurotechnology experiments (Aim 1), and by providing a succinct introductory course and on-site training for scientists, engineers, and clinicians (Aim 2). We hypothesize that this work will greatly accelerate realization of adaptive neurotechnologies that will reduce the devastating impact of neurological disorders. Achieving these two aims will create and disseminate a major new software resource for adaptive neurotechnol- ogy research. Its unique utility should enable more scientists, engineers, and clinicians to engage in this exciting work. Furthermore, this common, interoperable, readily adopted, and easily adapted platform should foster a collaborative environment that enables diverse investigators to work together and complement each other. In sum, we expect that the work of this proposal will accelerate realization of novel adaptive neurotechnologies that will hasten scienti?c investigations to improve treatment for many devastating neurological disorders.

Project Summary/Abstract Improved understanding of the brain processes underlying normal and abnormal function is necessary for devising better ways to diagnose, alleviate, or cure neurological or psychiatric disorders. It is clear that even for simple behaviors, such processes depend on interactions among multiple brain regions. However, these interactions themselves are less well understood. This inadequate understanding of inter-regional interactions impedes the generation of substantive models of brain functions and the new diagnostic or therapeutic possibilities that such models could introduce. These de?ciencies re?ect in part the limitations of the widely used imaging modalities. Detailed analysis of the operation of a network of brain regions requires comprehensive coverage, high spatial resolution, and high temporal resolution. However, existing techniques either lack high temporal resolution, high spatial resolution, or comprehensive coverage. Thus, they cannot track the spatial and temporal progression of inter-regional interactions. Intracranial recordings using electrocorticographic (ECoG) electrodes placed on the brain surface, or depth electrodes (stereoencephalography; SEEG) placed in regions and sulcal depths not accessible with ECoG, can provide wide coverage and high temporal and spatial resolution. Furthermore, electrical stimulation through these electrodes can assess causal roles and inter-regional connections. However, because intracranial electrodes are only available in patients awaiting brain surgery, intracranial studies are typically limited to small numbers of subjects with variable electrode coverage. In the research proposed here, our established and highly experienced ECoG/SEEG consortium will engage in a formalized research program that seeks to begin to reveal the detailed connectivity, causality, and dynamic neural processes supporting human speech perception. Research to achieve our two project aims will take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by intracranial electrodes. The proposed work will make use of an established interdisciplinary intracranial consortium, with four data collection sites providing access to dozens of subjects per year. The consortium will apply itself to answering new questions about dynamic inter-areal function underlying speech perception. If successful, the proposed work should not only add new neuroscienti?c understanding, but also formally validate a consortium structure as a model for intracranial research.

Neurological disorders affect millions of people in the United States and worldwide. Better understanding of the short-term changes and the persistent changes that result from precisely targeted electrical stimulation of brain networks can lead to novel technologies that improve diagnosis and treatment of these disorders. Intracranial recording/stimulation techniques using electrocorticographic (ECoG) electrodes on the brain surface and/or depth electrodes (stereoencephalography (SEEG)) provide a powerful method for spatially and temporally precise recording and stimulation, but current stimulation protocols are based largely on trial-and-error and thus are probably suboptimal. Taking optimal advantage of ECoG/SEEG requires the ability to design adaptive record- ing/stimulation protocols that induce speci?c bene?cial changes in the brain processes underlying behavior. The work proposed here will address this need by creating a stimulation-based system that can map cortical/subcortical functional networks and can modulate these networks so as to restore brain function. TR&D3's long-term goal is to develop and iteratively optimize a new generation of adaptive neurotechnologies that can introduce predictable changes in brain networks, and to clinically test the ef?cacy of those technologies for alleviating the devastating effects of neurological disorders such as stroke. To achieve this goal, TR&D3 has two Speci?c Aims: Aim 1. To establish the short-term changes in network activity and resulting behavior that are produced by electrical stimulation. Aim 1 comprises two studies. The ?rst study will use electrical stimulation to establish which and how brain networks are activated by electrical stimulation of speci?c locations. The second study will determine how input produced by electrical stimulation interacts with moment-by-moment variations in cortical excitability to produce population-level responses. Aim 2. To establish the persistent changes to network activity resulting from electrical stimulation. The ?rst study will determine to what extent stimulus-induced changes modify behavior in the short term and the long-term. The second study will assess the dependence of these changes on stimulus amplitude. These two aims will produce a stimulation-based functional imaging system. To validate and optimize this novel system, TR&D3 will engage in two collaborative projects with scientists at the University of California (Berkeley) and at MIT. Together, these collaborations will establish the effectiveness and value of the new stimulation-based functional imaging system. By accomplishing these aims, TR&D3 should produce new understanding of how electrical stimulation produces short-term and persistent changes in brain function. It should also create a new clinical system that can map brain networks and can target speci?c bene?cial changes in function. Thus, this work should increase scienti?c understanding and enhance treatment for a range of neurological disorders.