2023-08-27 04:00:05
American researchers have just succeeded in developing new neuronal sensors, making it possible to decode neuron signals and transform them into words, much more efficiently than before. This is a great advance in the treatment of aphasia (Aphasia, sometimes called mutism in popular language, is a pathology of…).
Image d’illustration Pixabay
It is not one, but two teams of researchers who have just shared their results. First a team from the University of California at San Francisco, and a second (Second is the feminine of the adjective second, which comes immediately after the first or who…) from Stanford University (La Leland Stanford Junior University, better known as Stanford University, is one…). These scientists have just announced that they have succeeded in developing decoders capable of interpreting the words thought by a person, at a speed (We distinguish:) never before achieved. A person normally speaks at a rate of 150 to 200 words per minute (Primary form of a document: Law: a minute is the original of an act. …). The sensors (A sensor is a device which transforms the state of an observed physical quantity into a…) developed by these teams are capable of decoding at a rate of 78 words per minute for the first and 60 words per minute for the second, with an average error rate of 25%.
Both teams succeeded in lowering the error rate below 10% when they limited the tests to reduced vocabulary (less than 100 words). These performances are five times better than those mentioned in previous studies carried out in the field. Indeed, such an operation had been successful several years ago, but required great efforts to be able to express about fifteen words per minute. Moreover, unlike the previous models developed, patients are not forced to train the algorithm for many months before achieving interesting performances.
One of the teams used a plate filled with microprocessors, which they positioned on the surface of the brain (The brain is the main organ of the central nervous system of animals. The brain processes…), just under the scalp (The scalp refers to the part of the skin of the skull that …), allowing it to interact with thousands of neurons involved in language. It was this technique that managed to reach the rate of 78 words per minute. The scientists have also supplemented this method with an algorithm capable of generating adapted facial animations, which the patient (In the field of medicine, the term patient commonly designates a person receiving…) can also control by thought.
The other team implanted chips inside the brain, interacting with a much more limited number of neurons but just as effective. To their surprise, they found that when the chips were located near Broca’s area (an area of the brain known to be associated with language), the efficiency was actually poor.
Use by a patient suffering from aphasia, of a new method allowing her to communicate thanks to the implantation of electronic chips in her brain
The video above shows a 68-year-old American woman who managed to speak again thanks to sensors implanted in her brain, even though she had not been able to speak for years due to Charcot’s disease.
Aphasia affects nearly 300,000 people each year in France. This language disorder is usually caused by brain damage due to a cerebrovascular accident (A cerebrovascular accident (CVA), sometimes called a “stroke…) (CVA), head trauma (The notion of head trauma or traumatic brain injury -cerebral (TCC) covers…), or a degenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s disease. Let’s hope that this research will continue to further improve these methods, and that they may eventually lead to a concrete solution (concrete is a more or less hard paste obtained after extraction of a…) to bring to these many people.
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