neuroengineering

[neuroengineering]

Lab-grown nerve fibers could help a battered body heal itself By Christine Gorman "The stretch-grown axons could also be used to treat people with major nerve damage that does not necessarily require amputation. The biohybrid bridge provides a conduit for the undamaged part of the peripheral nervous system to bypass the injured nerve and regrow its own axons all the way to the end of the affected limb. If such bridges could be implanted within a few days to weeks of the injury, they would benefit from the fact that neural support cells are still active throughout the length of the limb (these cells usually take a few months to disappear after nerve death) and could guide the regrowing nerve fiber to its final destination."

[neuroengineering]

Amputees who experience phantom limb pain can sometimes get relief from an optical illusion. This trick involves looking in a mirror at the reflection of a healthy limb from a certain angle, which causes it to appear where the missing limb should be. Seeing the limb move freely fools the brain into relieving the pain. Now a study suggests this technique might also work for arthritis pain. Cognitive scientist Laura Case, working in the lab of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (a member of Scientific American Mind’s board of advisers) at the University of California, San Diego, used a modified version of the mirror technique to superimpose a researcher’s healthy hand over a subject’s arthritic hand, which was painfully constricted or contorted. Subjects mimicked the slow, purposeful movements of the researcher’s hand with their own unseen hand. After experiencing the illusion of their hand moving smoothly, subjects rated their arthritis pain slightly lower than before and had an increased range of motion. The result suggests that the toxic soup of inflammatory molecules bathing an arthritic joint is not the only source of painful sensations. “The brain has learned to associate movement with pain,” says Case, who presented her results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last November in Washington, D.C. The illusion provides the brain with a way to disconnect the sight from the sensation. Next, the group will investigate whether this type of mirror therapy might provide long-term benefits for arthritis, a condition that affects about 50 million Americans. This article was published in print as "Brain Trick Relieves Pain."

[neuroengineering]

The Science Behind ‘Beatboxing’

Acoustical analysis reveals the anatomy behind the fascinating array of sounds people can make.

Using the mouth, lips, tongue and voice to generate sounds that one might never expect to come from the human body is the specialty of the artists known as beatboxers. Now scientists have used scanners to peer into a beatboxer as he performed his craft to reveal the secrets of this mysterious art.

The human voice has long been used to generate percussion effects in many cultures, including North American scat singing, Celtic lilting and diddling, and Chinese kouji performances. In southern Indian classical music, konnakol is the percussive speech of the solkattu rhythmic form. In contemporary pop music, the relatively young vocal art form of beatboxing is an element of hip-hop culture.

Until now, the phonetics of these percussion effects were not examined in detail. For instance, it was unknown to what extent beatboxers produced sounds already used within human language.

To learn more about beatboxing, scientists analyzed a 27-year-old male performing in real-time using MRI. This gave researchers “an opportunity to study the sounds people produce in much greater detail than has previously been possible,” said Shrikanth Narayanan, a speech and audio engineer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “The overarching goals of our work drive at larger questions related to the nature of sound production and mental processing in human communication, and a study like this is a small part of the larger puzzle.”

The investigators made 40 recordings each lasting 20-40 seconds long as the beatboxer produced all the effects in his repertoire, as individual sounds, composite beats, rapped lyrics, sung lyrics and freestyle combinations of these elements. He categorized 17 distinct percussion sounds into five instrumental classes — kick drums, rim shots, snare drums, hi-hats, and cymbals. The artist demonstrated his repertoire at several different tempos, ranging from slower at roughly 88 beats per minute, to faster at 104.

“We were astonished by the complex elegance of the vocal movements and the sounds being created in beatboxing, which in itself is an amazing artistic display,” Narayanan said. “This incredible vocal instrument and its many capabilities continue to amaze us, from the intricate choreography of the ‘dance of the tongue’ to the complex aerodynamics that work together to create a rich tapestry of sounds that encode not only meaning but also a wide range of emotions.”

“It is absolutely amazing that a person can make these sounds — that a person has such control over the timing of various parts of the speech apparatus,” said phonetician Donna Erickson at the Showa University of Music and Sophia University, both in Japan, who did not participate in this study. “It is very exciting to see how far technology has come — that we can see these movements in real time. It gives us a much better understanding of how the various parts of our speech anatomy work.”

[neuroengineering]

A micrograph of a killer T cell, a white blood cell that destroys germs or cancers, but that can sometimes attack the body’s own normal cells.

Misguided killer T cells may be the missing link in sustained tissue damage in the brains and spines of people with multiple sclerosis, findings...

[neuroengineering]

Company Spotlight: Triangle Biosystems International

Photo:Neuroware Wireless Recording Station with Software In this feature, I will be spotlighting various companies working in neuroengineering or a closely related field. For the first feature, I am spotlighting Triangle Biosystems International (TBSI). Company Tagline: Simplicity in Neuro-Solutions Headquarters Location: Durham, NC, USA What they do: Produce "neurological research equipment for brain and nerve monitoring, recording and stimulation." TBSI provides a wide-array of equipment ranging from single cell action potential recording systems to EEG recording systems. They also provide comprehensive software solutions for applying stimulation and recording signals. Their products include both wireless and tethered solutions, thus offering extensive project flexibility depending on the user's needs.

[neuroengineering]

Bionic Eyes

Australian based consortium, Bionic Vision Australia, recently performed a successful implantation of a prototype bionic eye. Outfitted with 24 electrodes, the bionic eye does not by any means provide clear vision to the user, but it does however allow scientists to understand how to best implement this technology. The recipient of the implant, Ms Diane Ashworth, suffers from retinitis pigmentosa which has caused severe vision loss. Ms Ashworth said she hoped to "make a contribution" by being the first recipient of such an implant. Upon completion of the surgery, Ms Ashworth could see varied shapes appearing in front of her eye as the stimulation of her implant changed. 24-electrode most likely translates to 6X4 bit resolution, which is far shy of the resolution scientists hope to be able to obtain with such implants in the coming years.