Swiss and French scientists achieved a huge and exciting breakthrough in regards to the neural surgeryafter a man quadriplegic I can walk again thanks to the first connection or human-machine interface through artificial intelligence.
According to the prestigious nature magazinethe advance was presented in the Vaud University Hospital Center (CHUV), in the Swiss city of Lausanneand the patient with whom the connection was tested was a 40-year-old Dutchman named Gert-Jan.
what happened to the patient
As specified in the investigation, the man he lost the mobility of his legs 12 years ago in a bicycle accident.
“Four years ago I didn’t even dream of something like this”shared in an interview with EFE the man, who was invited in 2016 by scientific institutions in Switzerland.
In that sense, gert-jan underwent several operations in which they had to place two implants, in the spinal cord, and the rest, much more complex, with an interface or connector between the brain and a computer which, through 64 electrodes, takes brain stimuli and passes them into digital data after a learning phase of both the human and the machine.
The great protagonist is undoubtedly the artificial intelligencebecause through her the second case could be viable.
He researcher Guillaume Charvet, from the Atomic Energy Commissariata French institution that has worked on the project, added in dialogue with EFE that “this interface is capable of recording brain activity on the surface of the cortex.”
Subsequently, and after having the implants, the patient was asked, in a phase that required months of training, to imagine moving his legs: when doing so, his brain emitted stimuli that, through algorithms, were converted into data that would later reach the implant in his spinal cord and be converted into movement, provides Clarin.
“In a few minutes he could move the avatar, so we decided to try to see if he could get up, and when he took his first steps we almost cried to see how fast he had been”explained in dialogue with EFE the neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch, another of the main managers of the project.
“The next step is, of course, to spread this technology to more patients, and for that we need to industrialize it,” he completed. Bloch, professor at both CHUV and EPFL and at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), another center linked to the project.
