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Clinical translation of a high-performance neural prosthesis

Nature Medicine volume 21, pages 1142–1145 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Neural prostheses have the potential to improve the quality of life of individuals with paralysis by directly mapping neural activity to limb- and computer-control signals. We translated a neural prosthetic system previously developed in animal model studies for use by two individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis who had intracortical microelectrode arrays placed in motor cortex. Measured more than 1 year after implant, the neural cursor-control system showed the highest published performance achieved by a person to date, more than double that of previous pilot clinical trial participants.

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Figure 1: Comparison of neural control performance for participants S3, T6 and T7.
Figure 2: Comparison of VKF and ReFIT neural control performance for T6 and T7.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants T6, T7, S3 and their families; E.N. Eskandar for participant T7's implantation surgery; B. Davis, B. Pedrick, M. Coburn, B. Travers and D. Rosler for administrative support; S.I. Ryu for surgical assistance; L. Barefoot, P. Gigante, A. Sachs, S. Cash, J. Menon and S. Mernoff for clinical assistance; K. Newell for data collection assistance; J. Saab and N. Schmansky for technical assistance; and J.P. Donoghue for helpful scientific discussions. This work was supported by the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neuroscience; Stanford BioX-NeuroVentures; the Stanford Office of Postdoctoral Affairs; the Garlick Foundation; the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation; The US National Institutes of Health: the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) (R01DC009899, principal investigator (PI): L.R.H.; R01DC014034, PI: J.M.H.), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) (RO1NS066311-S1, PI: K.V.S.), the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)-National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research (NCMRR) (N01HD53403 and N01HD10018, Sub-award PI: L.R.H.); the Rehabilitation Research and Development Service, Department of Veterans Affairs (B6453R and B6310N, PI: L.R.H.); and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-Deane Institute for Integrated Research on Atrial Fibrillation and Stroke. The content of this paper is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Vikash Gilja and Chethan Pandarinath: These authors contributed equally to this work.

  2. Krishna V Shenoy and Jaimie M Henderson: These authors jointly directed this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Vikash Gilja, Chethan Pandarinath, Christine H Blabe, Paul Nuyujukian, Jaimie M Henderson & Jaimie M Henderson

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Vikash Gilja, Chethan Pandarinath, Paul Nuyujukian & Krishna V Shenoy

  3. School of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

    Vikash Gilja, John D Simeral, Anish A Sarma, János A Perge & Leigh R Hochberg

  4. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    Vikash Gilja

  5. Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Chethan Pandarinath, Paul Nuyujukian, Krishna V Shenoy & Jaimie M Henderson

  6. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology, Rehabilitation R&D Service, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

    John D Simeral, Anish A Sarma, János A Perge, Beata Jarosiewicz & Leigh R Hochberg

  7. Brown Institute for Brain Science, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

    John D Simeral, Anish A Sarma, János A Perge, Beata Jarosiewicz & Leigh R Hochberg

  8. Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    John D Simeral, Anish A Sarma, Brittany L Sorice & Leigh R Hochberg

  9. Department of Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

    Beata Jarosiewicz

  10. Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Leigh R Hochberg

  11. Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Krishna V Shenoy

  12. Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Krishna V Shenoy

  13. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Krishna V Shenoy

Authors
  1. Vikash Gilja
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  2. Chethan Pandarinath
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  7. Brittany L Sorice
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  8. János A Perge
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  9. Beata Jarosiewicz
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  10. Leigh R Hochberg
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  12. Jaimie M Henderson
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Contributions

V.G. and C.P. were responsible for study design, further guided by K.V.S., J.M.H. and L.R.H. V.G. and C.P. were responsible for research infrastructure development, data collection, analysis, algorithm design and manuscript preparation. All authors contributed to the manuscript. P.N. and B.J. contributed to infrastructure development and algorithm design. C.H.B. and B.L.S. contributed to the data collection effort from study participants T6 and T7, respectively. C.H.B. participated in study design. A.A.S. and J.D.S. contributed to infrastructure development. J.D.S. provided data from subject S3. J.A.P. and B.J. conducted offline analyses to inform algorithm design. J.M.H. was responsible for surgical implantation for study participant T6. L.R.H. is the sponsor-investigator of the multi-site pilot clinical trial. J.M.H. and K.V.S. were involved in all aspects of the study.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jaimie M Henderson.

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Competing interests

This work relates to patent US 8792976.

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Gilja, V., Pandarinath, C., Blabe, C. et al. Clinical translation of a high-performance neural prosthesis. Nat Med 21, 1142–1145 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3953

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