A team of Swiss and French scientists achieved a huge breakthrough in neural surgery, reported today in the prestigious scientific journal "Nature": a paraplegic man was able to walk again through the first human-machine connection or interface trained with artificial intelligence.
This advance was presented at the University Hospital Center of Vaud (CHUV), in the Swiss city of Lausanne, where that first patient in which it was tested, a 40-year-old Dutchman named Gert-Jan and who 12 years ago lost the mobility of his legs in a bicycle accident, walked in front of journalists.
"Four years ago I didn't even dream of something like this," the patient, who was invited in 2016 by scientific institutions in Switzerland to participate in the program, previously experimented with apes but until then had not been tested on humans, told EFE.
"Four years ago I didn't even dream of this," says the 40-year-old patient.
Gert-Jan underwent operations in which two implants were placed: one in the spinal cord, and another more complex, an interface or connector between the human brain and a computer that, through 64 electrodes, collects brain stimuli and translates them into digital data after a phase of learning both human and machine. Thanks to artificial intelligence in this second case.
The man had implants placed in his spinal cord. Photo: AFP.
"This interface is capable of recording brain activity on the surface of the cortex," researcher Guillaume Charvet, from the Commissariat of Atomic Energy, a French institution that has worked on the project together with the aforementioned CHUV, the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) and other organizations, told EFE.
After receiving these implants, the patient was asked, in a phase that required months of training, to imagine moving his legs: in doing so, his brain emitted stimuli that, through algorithms, were converted into data that would later reach the implant of his spinal cord and be converted into movement.
Standing, after 10 years without being able to walk. Photo: AFP.
"It was the hardest part, thinking about natural movement after 10 years without trying," Gert-Jan said.
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 was carried to his own spinal cord.
"In a few minutes he could move the avatar, so we decided to try to see if he could get up, and when he took his first steps we almost cried when we saw that he had been so fast," neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch, another of the main responsible for the project, recalled in statements to EFE.
The quadriplegic man walked again thanks to a digital bridge between his brain and spinal cord. Photo: AFP.
The patient now walks with the help of a walker, and the brain-machine system, which has not yet been miniaturized, is still somewhat cumbersome, since the patient needs headphones to send his orders through waves, and a laptop resting on the walker to decode them before they are emitted to the spinal cord, in a matter of two or three tenths of a second.
In any case, the advance in neuroscience is enormous, according to the researchers themselves, because of the important link that has been achieved between brain and machine, also using a technology as promising as artificial intelligence.
"The next step is, of course, to spread this technology to more patients, and for that we need to industrialize it," said Bloch, a professor at both CHUV and EPFL and the University of Lausanne (UNIL), another center linked to the project.
In this sense, the Dutch company Onward Medical has already obtained support from the European Commission to develop together with research institutions a commercial version of this digital interface.
The researchers also highlight among the goals to be achieved in the near future that of bringing this mobility to the upper extremities (arms and hands) in order to be useful also to quadriplegic people.
For Gert-Jan, who says he has regained simple pleasures such as having a beer standing at a bar with his friends, the next goal is to be able to walk without the help of the walker: "I think it could take me a year of training," he says.
The 40-year-old patient, standing, after a decade prostrate. Photo: AFP.
Other leaders of the project are neuroscience professor Grégoire Courtine and Henri Lorach, head of the brain-computer program at EPFL, CHUV and UNIL.
The brain implant, about five centimeters in diameter and which includes antennas to send the patient's orders without the need for cables, requires a craniotomy, in which a part of the skull is replaced by this device.
This technology could also be applied to people who have suffered paralysis due to a stroke or stroke.
Professor Bloch stressed that one condition for it to be applied is that the patient has at least six centimeters of their spinal cord intact, since it is in them that the electrodes are inserted to control the movement of the limbs.
"We estimate that it will be about five years before it can be extended to everyone, but in the meantime, we will acquire a lot of knowledge in the project," he anticipated.
The project could go even further and serve for the recovery of lost natural neurological functions: in the first patient, improvements in sensory perceptions and motor abilities have been identified, even with the interface turned off, a kind of "digital repair" of the spinal cord in which nerve connections have developed.
Source: EFE