This mobile brain-monitoring device includes a rod and a backpack that works in conjunction with a neural implant. It can also be paired with virtual reality goggles.
Topolovic Et al./Neuron
By Rebecca Touchshare
In the journey it is called neuroscience. Scientists have developed a backpack that tracks and stimulates brain activity as people move forward in their daily lives. These advance researchers can gain insights into how the brain works outside the laboratory and how to monitor diseases such as Parkinson’s and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The technology is an “inspiring demonstration of what is possible” with portable neuroscience devices, says Timothy Spellman, a neurobiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, who was not involved with the work. The backpack and its vast equipment, he says, can expand the landscape for neuroscience research when the body is in motion to study the brain.
In general, when scientists want to scan the brain, they need a lot of room and a lot of money. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) scanners, which detect activity in different regions of the brain, are about the size of a pickup truck and can cost upwards of 1 million. And patients must stay in the machine for about 1 hour to ensure a clear, readable scan.
Approaches such as transcranial neural magnetic stimulation (TMS) that engulf the brain – often even for the treatment of severe depression – are not portable; Patients must sit still and upright in the lab for about 30 minutes while the large coil delivers magnetic pulses from their scalp to electrically active neurons.
In search of a better way, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed what they call the Mobile Deep Brain Recording and Stimulation Platform.
Here’s how it works: To rest near the top of the skin above the patient’s skull, a stick sticks out of a 4-kilogram backpack. There, the rod can communicate with the neural implants deep in the brain. Meanwhile, the backpack is full of monitors – a setup that allows real-time data storage from implants. At the same time, depending on the experiment, participants can wear extra gear to measure brain and body activities, including a scalp electroencephalography cap with electrodes, which monitor brain surface activity, a pair of virtual reality goggles, which monitor eye movement and other devices. That tracks the heart and breathing rate. All this information can then be synchronized with the planting signs.
“The beauty of this is that you have so many streams of data coming together,” says study author Zahra Akhajan, a UCLA neurophysicist.
In lab testing, the team was able to show that backpacks record activity and stimulate people in different regions of the brain without the need to be static. It was also able to collect data similar to an FMRI machine and stimulate the brain in the same way as TMS, the team reported this week. Neuron.
Not being confined to a lab setting, the researchers say, scientists can study how the brain works and communicates with others instead of sleeping inside an FMRI machine.
There is a catch, though: only patients who have a neural implant can use the device. There are about 150,000 such transplants worldwide, which doctors use to treat and monitor a variety of conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Euros Topolovic, a PhD study author, says the team has released backpack software and blueprints for all scientists to use. Student at UCLA. The hope, he said, is that other researchers could use the technology to study all sorts of neurological conditions without the hassle of a lab or hospital bed.
