International Conference on Neuroscience, Neuroinformatics, Neurotechnology and Neuro-Psycho-Pharmacology in Bucharest

Russian ministry of Education and Science Government grant ag. No 14.641.31.0003, Megagrant to Mikhail Lebedev.

Mikhail Lebedev participated with the invited talk "Repairing the brain with brain-machine interfaces" in the International conference in Bucharest, Romania, 15-17th of November.

The lecture covered the major advances made in brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). BMIs link the brain to external devices, with an eventual goal of recovery of motor, sensory and cognitive functions to patients with neurological conditions. Over the past half-century, BMIs have advanced significantly from the early ideas that sounded like science fiction to the modern high-tech implementations. In particular, intracranial recordings using multichannel implants have enabled real-time control of artificial limbs by nonhuman primates and human subjects. BMIs can restore upper-limb and lower-limb functions. Furthermore, bidirectional BMIs can provide artificial sensory feedback, allowing users to perceive the movements of prosthetic limbs and their interaction with external objects. BMIs can also multitask, like simultaneously decoding orientation of spatial attention and motor goals. Recently, BMI approach was employed to build brain-nets that enable information exchange between individual brains and execution of cooperative tasks. Overall, BMIs appear to be an efficient approach to augmenting the brain function, with limitless perspectives.

The research is coducted on the Russian ministry of Education and Science Government grant ag. No 14.641.31.0003, Megagrant to Mikhail Lebedev.