Douglas Soboslay retweetledi
So I did a project for my masters that was adjacent to this and it's still the coolest engineering challenge in modern biomedicine.
the brain is a moving target. it pulses with your heartbeat, drifts with breathing, and is wrapped in vasculature so dense you can't go a millimeter through cortex without hitting capillaries.
for sixty years the field used the utah array: rigid silicon needles, no movement compensation. they work for months, scar tissue isolates the electrodes which causes the signal to die.
neuralink solved it differently where each thread is 4-6 microns wide (thinner than human hair), made of polyimide with embedded gold electrodes. polymer flexes with brain motion instead of fighting it.
128 threads, 8 electrodes each, 1,024 recording sites. every electrode lives within 60 microns of its target neuron.
so they also need robots bc human hands have tremor at the 50-micron scale. the robot uses real-time imaging to plan paths around vasculature and inserts up to six threads per minute through a 25-micron tungsten needle while the brain is actively moving underneath it.
the outcomes are paralyzed patients controlling computers by thought, already happening. Noland Arbaugh has been using his implant ten hours a day for over two years. 21 participants across four countries now.
i'm pretty optimistic.
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