A brain-computer connection allows a paraplegic to walk

A team of Swiss and French scientists has achieved a huge breakthrough in neural surgery, which was reported this week by the prestigious scientific journal “Nature”: a paraplegic was able to walk again through the first human-machine link or interface trained by artificial intelligence.

This advance was presented at the Vaud University Hospital Center (CHUV) in the Swiss city of Lausanne, where the first patient tested was a 40-year-old Dutch man named Gert-Jan who lost his mobility 12 years ago. legs in a bicycle accident, she walked in front of the press.

Four years ago, I didn’t even dream of something like this, the patient told EFE, who was invited by Swiss scientific institutions in 2016 to participate in the program, having previously experimented with monkeys, but had not been tested on humans until then.

Gert-Jan underwent an operation in which two implants were inserted: one in the spinal cord and the other more complex, an interface or connector between the human brain and a computer that collects brain impulses through 64 electrodes and translates them into digital data. after the learning phase of both man and machine, thanks Artificial Intelligence in the latter case.

“This interface can record brain activity on the surface of the cortex,” explained researcher Guillaume Charvet from the Atomic Energy Commission, a French institution that worked on the project together with the aforementioned CHUV, the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne. EFE (EPFL) and other organizations.

After receiving these implants, the patient was asked, in a phase that required several months of training, to imagine moving his legs: while doing so, his brain emitted stimuli that were transformed by algorithms into data that would later reach the implants. spinal cord and it would turn into movement.

“That was the hardest part, thinking about natural movement after 10 years of not trying.Gert-Jan admitted.

At first he trained his movements on an avatar, a digital and on-screen version of himself that he began to move with his thoughts, and eventually the system took over his own spinal cord.

“In a few minutes he could move the avatar, so we decided to try to see if he could stand up, and when he took his first steps, we almost cried seeing how fast he was,” neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch, another of the project’s main managers.

The patient now walks with the help of a walker, and the brain-machine system, which has not yet been miniaturized, is still somewhat bulky, since the patient needs a headset to send his commands through the waves and a laptop computer on the walker to decode them before they are delivered to the spinal cord. the brain, within two to three tenths of a second.

In any case, the progress in neuroscience is enormous, according to the researchers themselves, because of the important connection that has been made between the brain and the machine, also using promising technology such as artificial intelligence.

The brain implant, which is about five centimeters in diameter and includes antennae to send commands to the patient without the need for cables, requires a craniotomy, in which part of the skull is replaced with this device.

According to its creators, this technology could also be applied to people who have suffered paralysis from cerebrovascular attack or stroke.