Release date: 2016-11-29
According to Nature, a newly developed technology enables researchers and healthcare professionals to explore deeper areas of the brain without craniotomy of patients, such as the study of human memory and the performance of emotions in the brain.
The brain stimulation technique of applying electrodes to the human scalp seems to be safe, and proponents believe that this theory can promote some brain functions, including strengthening intelligence and decompression. This statement is more reliable than other non-mainstream theories and has been supported by recent research. But this technology is still limited because they can't reach deep into the brain. Conversely, the use of transplantation techniques in deep brain stimulation (DBS) is more successful than direct in the brain. But the equipment is more risky because it involves surgery and it is difficult to repair in the event of an accident.
The annual Neuroscience Society was held last week in San Diego, California. Nir Grossman, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demonstrated his experimental theory in Cambridge and his colleagues: to adapt to deep brain transcranial stimulation TCS . Their method involves transmitting electrical signals from the electrodes placed on the scalp through the surface of the brain and operating the current in a way that does not require surgery. Their team used this stimulation device to generate two currents to stimulate the brain behind the ears of the mice, and to stimulate the mice slightly with different high-frequency currents, and then they measured the two independent currents so that they could be obtained on the hippocampus. Cross-stimulation.
The neurons in the brain usually sense low frequencies, so these high-frequency currents pass through the brain tissue without affecting the brain. But at the point of the two electrodes through which the current passes, they mostly weaken each other's output. At these two frequencies, the remaining potential difference produces neural areas that are considered to be single, inducing low frequencies, which will trigger them to launch a fire attack against the opposing sound. When these researchers carefully analyzed the brains of animals, they found that they had been burned through in the cells of the hippocampus, but not outside the brain.
Human testing phase
The team is now working on testing the technology in human volunteers, working with Grossman on the project's Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Boston Medical School in Massachusetts (USA). Although each volunteer is lying in the scanner, the researcher can measure how the hippocampus is moving in real time to the transcranial stimulation in his brain. But they have not tested whether this stimulus can affect behavior, such as improving memory performance.
Grossman said that this technology also requires a lot of debugging and testing. In particular, the electric field was not very accurate in the experiment and actually stimulated a larger area of ​​the hippocampus of the mouse.
Angel Peterchev, a neuroscientist at Duke University in North Carolina, is skeptical about the technology. He pointed out that the frequency used by researchers before may be too low to pass cleanly through the brain, which may cause off-target effects.
However, Joel Voss, a neuroscientist at Berg Medical School in Northwestern Illinois, in Chicago, USA, considers this to be a hot research direction. Voss' team used a similar method called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to direct and activate. The nerves on the surface of the brain. The signal extends through the nerve's trajectory to the deeper areas of the brain and marks the hippocampus in this way. His team temporarily improved the memory of healthy volunteers.
Meet the demand
Voss mentioned that adaptive transcranial stimulation (TCS) is not reliable at all times, but it is fortunate that researchers are experimenting with many brain stimulation methods, not limited to implantation methods and surgery. method.
Pascual-Leone acknowledged this problem and the team is currently further enhancing the response after stimulation by switching frequency and using specific drug-carrying cells. “We are very excited to find that this change is quite promising,†Pascual-Leone said, but the technology has not yet been perfected.
Helen Mayberg, a psychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, has doubts that the implantation method can quickly replace the transcranial approach, especially in today's brain deep stimulation surgery (DBS) with good clinical results. But Helen Mayberg firmly believes that "at present, we have the ability to provide patients with a degree of treatment. Ten years later, doctors have the hope of providing patients with non-invasive brain treatment techniques."
This article was translated from Nature by Elaine.
Source: Lei Feng Net
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