Friday, May 16, 2014

Personal Notes On Curing Neurological / Psychiatric Diseases / Disabilities [Unofficial]


Neural Engineering

  • Artificial Retina
    • Current generation: Very low resolution.
    • "Learning to see" period.
  • Epilepsy - Implantable Electrodes, Brain Cooling, Drug Delivery
    • Implantable Devices Could Detect and Halt Epileptic Seizures - Scientific American
    • Closed Loop Devices:
      • Idea: Detecting seizure onsets and stopping them.
      • Implantable Electrodes
      • Brain Cooling
        • Detecting temperature (associated with seizures) and controlling
      • Drug Delivery 
        • Closed loop
        • Continuous, at regular intervals
      • Challenges for Closed Loop Devices:
        • False positives: Detecting normal activities as seizures.
    • Open loop devices
      • VNS - Vagus Nerve Stimulation (from 1997)
      • Deep brain stimulation
        • Some people have too many seizures; stopping some would be considered as progress.
    • Second generation Closed Loop Devices
      • Not just detecting onset of seizures; rather predicting seizures before they even start.

  • Body Amputation
  • Cochlear Implant
  • Brain Computer Interfacing
  • Tom Mitchell & others applying Machine Learning Techniques to find correlations in 
    • neural firing patterns, spikes and 
    • behavior / thought.
  • Techniques, broadly defined:
    • Neuromechanics
    • Neuromodulation
    • Neural Repair and Regenesis
  • Optogenetics
  • Connectomics [2]
  • Neural patterns should be analogous to what is out there in the world (VS Ramachandran - Similarity of letters, image, sound [3]). Neural processing is modular (Vision - modules for color, shape, etc.).






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