Cortical Neural Prosthesis Performance Improves When Eye Position Is Monitored

• Published in: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 24 - 31
• Main Authors: Batista, Aaron P., Yu, Byron M., Santhanam, Gopal, Ryu, Stephen I., Afshar, Afsheen, Shenoy, Krishna V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01-02-2008
• Subjects: Algorithms; Animals; Biomedical engineering; Brain-machine interface; Calibration; Cerebral Cortex - cytology; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Decoding; Electrodes; Electrodes, Implanted; Electrophysiology; Eye Movements - physiology; Hand - physiology; Macaca mulatta; Male; Monitoring; monkey; multielectrode; Neural prosthesis; neural prosthetics; Neurons; Neurons - physiology; Performance gain; Poisson Distribution; premotor cortex; Proposals; Prostheses and Implants; Prosthetics; Systems engineering and theory; Brain-Machine Interface; Premotor cortex; Neural Prosthetics; Multi-electrode; Monkey
• ISSN: 1534-4320
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2007.906958

Neural prostheses that extract signals directly from cortical neurons have recently become feasible as assistive technologies for tetraplegic individuals. Significant effort toward improving the performance of these systems is now warranted. A simple technique that can improve prosthesis performance is to account for the direction of gaze in the operation of the prosthesis. This proposal stems from recent discoveries that the direction of gaze influences neural activity in several areas that are commonly targeted for electrode implantation in neural prosthetics. Here, we first demonstrate that neural prosthesis performance does improve when eye position is taken into account. We then show that eye position can be estimated directly from neural activity, and thus performance gains can be realized even without a device that tracks eye position.