Upcoming and Recent Events
NCAN Seminar Series
Speaker: Dr. Lee Miller, PhD
Title: Restoring hope and hand movement to humans with paralysis using a biomimetic brain-computer interface: Opportunities and challenges
Time: February 25, 11 AM EST
The greatest desire for most people with high-level spinal cord injury is for restored hand movement. My lab developed an intracortical brain-computer interface (iBCI) in monkeys that used recordings of single neurons in the motor cortex to make predictions of muscle activity. These, in turn, we used to control Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) of the muscles of the monkey’s hand, which were temporarily paralyzed by a peripheral nerve block. This FES iBCI allowed the monkeys to voluntarily control not only the movement of their fingers, but also to exert graded force on grasped objects. This “biomimetic” iBCI allowed more nearly natural control of hand movement than is possible with other existing iBCIs.
In this talk, I will describe the basic work that led to our proof-of-concept in monkeys, and our further development of wireless versions of the FES iBCI applicable to a broader range of the activities of daily living. We have examined the representation in M1, of a broad range of behaviors, including both well-learned, stereotyped movements in the lab, and the more natural grasping movements related to food retrieval and locomotion in the monkey’s home cage. These different motor actions occupy different regions of neural state space, have dimensionality ~50% larger than do the lab behaviors, and are somewhat more nonlinear. As a consequence, simple linear decoders of EMG fail. I will describe the novel approach we have recently taken to solve this problem, as well our most recent efforts to translate this technology to humans.
Lee E. Miller is a Professor in the Departments of Neuroscience, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. He received the Ph.D. degree in Physiology from Northwestern University in 1989, then completed two years of postdoctoral training in the Department of Medical Physics, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2016 and was the president of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement from 2015 - 2023. Dr. Miller has had a career-long interest in the motor and sensory signals that are generated by single neurons in the brains of monkeys during arm and hand movement. His early work was devoted to studying these signals in the brainstem, cerebral cortex, and cerebellum, and their relation to muscle activity. In the past 20 years, Dr. Miller’s lab has increasingly focused on translational research, in particular, the development of intracortical brain computer interface technology to restore limb movement to paralyzed patients. His interdisciplinary approach has led to productive collaborations locally, nationally, and internationally. Most recently he has begun working with humans with spinal cord injury as part of the Cortical Bionics Research Group. He has authored over 140 manuscripts, book chapters, and review articles.
Speaker: Professor Cuntai Guan
Title: Research on Non-invasive BCI and its Applications
Time: March 25, 11 AM EST
Professor Cuntai Guan is a President’s Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He leads the Centre for Brain-Computing Research at NTU, where his team focuses on developing advanced non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) algorithms using machine learning and deep learning.
His research is particularly directed toward medical applications of BCI, including upper-limb stroke rehabilitation, interventions for children with ADHD, cognitive enhancement in the elderly, and treatments for patients with general anxiety. More recently, his group has expanded its focus to explore the potential applications of non-invasive BCI in lower-limb rehabilitation for stroke and spinal cord injury (SCI) patients, as well as speech rehabilitation for individuals with aphasia.
