A new sensor film that looks like clear plastic wrap could make brain surgery a lot safer for people with brain tumors or severe epilepsy.
With its tiny sensors, this innovative film picks up on the electrical activity of nerve cells below the brain's surface. This helps doctors remove diseased tissue while keeping essential functions like memory and language.
(Photo: Unsplash/JAFAR AHMED)
High-Resolution Technology Improves Surgical Accuracy
One of the people who helped make the film, Dr. Ahmed Raslan from Oregon Health and Science University, said he had faith in the project. He thinks this new development will help them do much better in their field.
The sensor film is a major advance over the sensor plates used in brain surgery. Shadi Dayeh, an engineer at the University of California, San Diego, oversees the project's development. He claims that the new film has 100 times more detail than the grids currently in use.
Dayeh says, "Imagine you're looking at the moon on a clear night." Now picture looking through a telescope." With this higher clarity, it is much easier to see the neural activity that controls important things like movement, speech, sensation, and thought.
The film is meant to improve functional brain mapping, a method used during surgeries to remove brain tumors or tissue causing severe seizures. Surgeons put a grid of sensors on the brain of an awake patient and ask them to do things like count to ten or move a finger.
These tasks can be changed depending on the patient's background. For example, scientists might be asked to solve equations, and artists might be asked to do tasks that require them to think visually.
Raslan says the sensors show which brain parts are active during each action. However, the edges of these active places aren't straight, like a zigzag shoreline. The more sensor points on the new grid make mapping more accurate, which increases the chances of keeping critical brain processes during surgery.
From Testing on Animals to Testing on People
Tests on animals have shown that the device works well. The FDA gave the go-ahead in May for tests on people. Dayeh and Raslan, who both have money invested in the device, are also working on a portable version that could be put in for up to 30 days.
With this wireless form, people with severe epilepsy could be watched for seizures at home instead of in a hospital. Researchers hope this technology will grow into a brain-computer link that people who can't move or talk can use. Dayeh says that this tool offers people a way to express their ideas.
Brain-computer connections today use sensors that are inserted deep into the brain. On the other hand, a surface grid would be safer and could pick up the activity of many more neurons. This study is part of the government's BRAIN Initiative, which started ten years ago to make tools that show how the brain works inside.
John Ngai, who is in charge of the BRAIN Initiative at the National Institutes of Health and helped make much of the film, says that our brains comprise complex pathways. Even though the BRAIN Initiative recently lost some funding, he is still hopeful that this study will help us learn more about how these circuits work.
He remembers that ten years ago, some of the country's best electrical engineers and computer scientists didn't think these gadgets would work. He says it is now clear that they are working. The new sensor film is a big step in improving care for people with brain illnesses.
This technology improves surgery accuracy by making a brain map with more information. It could also be used to improve brain-computer connections. As researchers continue to improve this new film, it looks like safer, more effective brain surgeries and a better understanding of how neurons work will be possible.
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