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Clinical translation of a high-performance neural prosthesis

Abstract

Neural prostheses have the potential to improve the quality of life of individuals with paralysis by directly mapping neural activity to limb- and computer-control signals. We translated a neural prosthetic system previously developed in animal model studies for use by two individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis who had intracortical microelectrode arrays placed in motor cortex. Measured more than 1 year after implant, the neural cursor-control system showed the highest published performance achieved by a person to date, more than double that of previous pilot clinical trial participants.

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Figure 1: Comparison of neural control performance for participants S3, T6 and T7.
Figure 2: Comparison of VKF and ReFIT neural control performance for T6 and T7.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants T6, T7, S3 and their families; E.N. Eskandar for participant T7's implantation surgery; B. Davis, B. Pedrick, M. Coburn, B. Travers and D. Rosler for administrative support; S.I. Ryu for surgical assistance; L. Barefoot, P. Gigante, A. Sachs, S. Cash, J. Menon and S. Mernoff for clinical assistance; K. Newell for data collection assistance; J. Saab and N. Schmansky for technical assistance; and J.P. Donoghue for helpful scientific discussions. This work was supported by the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neuroscience; Stanford BioX-NeuroVentures; the Stanford Office of Postdoctoral Affairs; the Garlick Foundation; the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation; The US National Institutes of Health: the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) (R01DC009899, principal investigator (PI): L.R.H.; R01DC014034, PI: J.M.H.), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) (RO1NS066311-S1, PI: K.V.S.), the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)-National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research (NCMRR) (N01HD53403 and N01HD10018, Sub-award PI: L.R.H.); the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service, Department of Veterans Affairs (B6453R and B6310N, PI: L.R.H.); and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-Deane Institute for Integrated Research on Atrial Fibrillation and Stroke. The content of this paper is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

V.G. and C.P. were responsible for study design, further guided by K.V.S., J.M.H. and L.R.H. V.G. and C.P. were responsible for research infrastructure development, data collection, analysis, algorithm design and manuscript preparation. All authors contributed to the manuscript. P.N. and B.J. contributed to infrastructure development and algorithm design. C.H.B. and B.L.S. contributed to the data collection effort from study participants T6 and T7, respectively. C.H.B. participated in study design. A.A.S. and J.D.S. contributed to infrastructure development. J.D.S. provided data from subject S3. J.A.P. and B.J. conducted offline analyses to inform algorithm design. J.M.H. was responsible for surgical implantation for study participant T6. L.R.H. is the sponsor-investigator of the multi-site pilot clinical trial. J.M.H. and K.V.S. were involved in all aspects of the study.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jaimie M Henderson.

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Competing interests

This work relates to patent US 8792976.

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Gilja, V., Pandarinath, C., Blabe, C. et al. Clinical translation of a high-performance neural prosthesis. Nat Med 21, 1142–1145 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3953

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