Scientists may have way to communicate with paralyzed

— -- Neuroscientists unveiled a way to potentially communicate with paralyzed or seemingly comatose patients using brain imaging machines in a report out today.

The finding follows on two decades of neuroscientists looking for ways to translate brain signals into messages to help "locked-in" paralyzed patients, such as those with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Researchers have made increasing advances in using devices that detect brain activity to help paralyzed patients, ones who often are forced to rely on eye blinks or facial muscle twitches to slowly send messages.

In the journal Current Biology, a neuroscience team led by Bettina Sorger of Maastricht University in The Netherlands, reports that the scanning machines translated signals in the brains of six healthy volunteers into letters, enabling them to spell messages.

"This is not mind-reading. It is under the person's control, so it is more like a typewriter for the brain," Sorger says. In the study, the volunteers could use their brains to deliver signals that were translated into letters by the scanners and finally into whole messages, typically taking them an hour or less to learn how to do it.

Such MRI machines, massive and expensive medical-imaging devices, are commonly found in hospitals where they are used to analyze injuries to organs, joints and other soft tissues. As volunteers imagined particular tasks, the study's MRI scanner detected signals of increased blood flow in very precise regions of the brain. The scanner decoded signals using a "data-mining" computer technique essential to translating brain signals into words. "For affected patients, time is not the most pressing matter, compared to just being able to communicate," Sorger says.

"The method, along with the state-of-the-art data mining technique, can be used to create a brain-controlled keyboard," says Harvard neuroscientist Seung-Schik Yoo, who was not part of the study. He suggests the MRI machine-based method will eventually serve as a "trainer" for paralyzed patients, who will then use less bulky and expensive devices that detect electrical signals from the scalp tuned to their precise brain signals. Already in use, that method is faster but has not worked very well for the most severely "locked-in" patients, Sorger says.

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The Dutch study team anticipates another alternative. They envision a more portable technology that senses light signals traveling in the brain, which are related to increased blood flow. The more portable device will use a translation scheme similar to the one used in the study. The translation scheme might prove useful in communicating with seemingly comatose patients, the team suggests.

"Communicating with those patients in acute care might actually be the most important opportunity pointed to in this study," suggests neuroscientist Philip Low of Neurovigil in La Jolla, Calif. Low heads an electrical brain-signal-messaging effort that involves famed physicist Stephen Hawking, who is paralyzed with ALS. The work will be discussed at a conference July 7 in Cambridge, England.

About 260,000 U.S. patients live with spinal cord injuries, which, combined with traumatic brain injuries and strokes, are responsible for roughly a million disability cases nationwide every year, according to American Heart Association committee estimates. Only in the most severely paralyzed cases, where patients are "locked in" to their brain, are they left without movement or speech.

"For me, if this helps even one person, it will have been worth the effort," says Sorger, who first came up with the way to translate MRI signals into letters as she was drifting off to sleep. "I wrote the idea down in a hurry, I didn't want to lose it," she says.