Dr. Contreras-Vidal & Team Reconstruct 3-D Hand Movement Through Brain Sensors

I just got done speaking with our own Dr. Contreras-Vidal about his studies of brain signals and movement, and it's truly something that's crossed into the area of "groundbreaking."

Dr. Contreras-Vidal and his research team have developed a method using tiny brain sensors to decode a person's hand movements. The study could have huge implications for treating Parkinson's disease and stroke victims, and creating brain-controlled prosthetics.

The major significance: it's all non-invasive, avoiding the risk typically associated with brain surgery and placing foreign devices inside the skull.

"People in the past thought it was not possible to get this information this way, and we proved otherwise," said Dr. Contreras-Vidal.

He and his research team of Dr. Rodolphe Gentili and bioengineering doctorate student, Trent Bradberry, borrowed a tool that has been used to study brain signals of monkeys. The device has eight arms, each with a button and a tiny bulb. When a bulb is lit up, the monkey is trained to press the button next to it, and then rewarded with food. Dr. Contreras-Vidal said his team thought it would be interesting to use the same device for humans, but without lighting the bulbs. This way, the participants are deciding on their own which buttons to push, and when to push them. The participant wears a cap full of tiny sensors that pick up brain signals, which are sent to an amplifier and then decoded.

You can watch a short demonstration below:

The team discovered a network of about 34 brain sensors that play a role in movement, one of them playing a bigger role than the others. But understanding the brain action that occurs in willful movement is just Step One. The next stage is actually constructing a system of using brain signals to control a machine. "We don't have it yet, but we are close," he said.

And from there, clinical application.

Dr. Contreras-Vidal says that these findings have opened a whole window of opportunity for a very broad clinical population. Because the data recording process is noninvasive, it could be applied to those who do not qualify for risky brain surgery, like children and the elderly. Further, the team's findings could lead to a better understanding of brain development among children.

You can read more about the research at EurekAlert, Scientific American, NPR's Science Friday, The Journal of Neuroscience and the UMD News Desk. You can also watch at TV Globo News Report (Spanish speaking). You can e-mail Dr. Contreras-Vidal.