An Ultrathin Brain Implant in Epilepsy Patients

Brain Map: The image depicts the insertion of implant into the brain of the cat. This device is flexible and can provide good coverage over uneven surfaces in the brain, allowing for good data acquisition.

Epilepsy, “a chronic neurological condition, is characterized by transient seizures of abnormal, excessive, hypersynchronous neural activity”. Although, this disorder can be mitigated and controlled with medications; however, it cannot be cured completely. Further complications can arise when some patients do not respond to medications. Under these conditions, surgeons can remove the affected region in the brain by a mapping process. The surgeons remove part of the skull and place a “bulky sensor array of the patient’s frontal cortex”. This sensor has certain restrictions and cannot accommodate “more than 100 electrodes” which causes poor resolution in electrical activity. Current technology where new array can allow for 360 electrodes even in a small space, has been developed to record signals from smaller and closer (to surface) regions in brain. The first test has been conducted in a cat’s brain where the signals looked like “propagating spiral waves”. This allowed scientists to change their traditional idea about how seizures affect large sections of the brain. Instead, it appears that “multiple cluster in brain or microdomains in the cortex are responsible for these seizures”.
The technical advancement, “biointegrated electronics allows researchers to enable less invasive testing and treatment” Thus, the size of the device plays an advantage in surgery, where the surgeons can remove only the microdomains instead of large sections of the brain.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/39158/?mod=chthumb