Medical 'decoder' could help those with spinal cord injury move again
Working with clients who have sustained a catastrophic spinal cord injury following a road accident or workplace incident helps me to understand the terrible impact on a person's life when they are left severely disabled or paralysed following injury.
It is obviously completely life-altering and affects the injured, all their family and their friends.
Some of our clients are fortunate enough to be able to regain a level of mobility through specialist rehabilitation and treatment, often funded via their spinal cord injury claim, and sheer hard work.
Sarah recovered from an horrific spinal cord injury after she was knocked off her bike by an HGV which broke her back. Watch Sarah's story.
For others, the injuries are permanent and they must completely reevaluate their lives and try to progress to live a meaningful future.
Which is why any positive medical developments for those with spinal cord injuries is such welcome news.
It is recently reported by the Neuro Rehab Times that biomedical engineering researchers at Washington University have developed a 'decoder' that has the potential to restore movement in people with spinal injury by rebuilding vital communication between the brain and spinal cord, which is interrupted by the injury, resulting in paralysis.
Because for these patients the brain and the spinal cord below the injury are functioning normally, the scientists looked to re-establish communication, which then allows for rehabilitation and potentially restores movement.
Through lab experiments with people without a spinal cord injury, they cued movement in the lower leg with transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation, or non-invasive, external electrical pulses.
They then used a special cap fitted with non-invasive electrodes to measure brain activity. The volunteers wearing the cap were asked to extend their leg at the knee and then to only think about extending it, while actually keeping it still, so they could record the brain waves in both sets of exercises.
This neural activity was then sent to the decoder, or algorithm, so it could learn how the brain waves were acting in both situations. Interestingly, the actual movement and the imagined movement used similar neural strategies.
Ismael Seáñez, lead on the study explained in the NRT that the decoder then learnt to predict based on neural activity whenever there is movement or no movement, i.e. when someone is thinking about moving their leg, even if it doesn't actually move.
The intention is that people with an injury who cannot move their legs can use the thought of moving their leg to train the decoder.
The hope is that they will eventually be able to use real-time predictions to stimulate the spinal cord during rehab to produce voluntary movement in a joint.
Going forward, the team plans to test a generalised decoder trained on data from all participants that could determine whether a universal decoder could perform as well as a personalised one and simplify its use in clinical settings.
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