Neuralink - Elon Musk's newest gadget

Neuralink, Elon Musk's company that has raised $158 million in 2017 to develop “ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers,” has unveiled its first outcome. Oculus CTO and legendary programmer John Carmack got a chance to visit Neuralink’s offices, calling it “very bold work.”

Neuralink says it has developed a new way of embedding electrodes in the brain using tiny insulated “threads” that resemble a string of pearls and connect to a chip embedded in the skull. Those threads are designed to be both sturdy enough to pass through brain tissue and withstand degradation,  while also being flexible enough to not damage tissue when the brain shifts in the skull. Neuralink showed the company’s prototype implant, the ‘N1 sensor’; it’s a very small, implantable SoC that has a number of extremely thin external ‘threads’ that measure 4 to 6 μm in width.

Neuralink debuted a surgical robot equipped with advanced optics that it says is precise enough to weave the delicate threads throughout brain tissue without damaging blood vessels. The system is “capable of inserting six threads (192 electrodes) per minute,” the Verge wrote. According to Bloomberg, Neuralink also wrote it has used the robot to perform at least 19 surgeries on animals with success rate of 87 percent. It does, of course, require a brain surgeon to actually operate. Neuralink’s aim is to eventually make this process as simple as LASIK outpatient eye surgery, Musk told the audience.

The Times reported that during a demo at the Neuralink building on Tuesday, the company showed off what it said was “a system connected to a laboratory rat reading information from 1,500 electrodes—15 times better than current systems embedded in humans.” If successfully applied to humans, that would be sufficient for research and medical applications, the Times wrote, though it noted that many more steps will be necessary to demonstrate its utility.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Neuralink’s research paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, as well as lacks critical data on how well it functions over time or whether it can cause brain inflammation."

Abstract of their White paper:

"Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) hold promise for the restoration of sensory and motor function and the treatment of neurological disorders, but clinical BMIs have not yet been widely adopted, in part because modest channel counts have limited their potential. In this white paper, we describe Neuralink’s first steps toward a scalable high-bandwidth BMI system. We have built arrays of small and flexible electrode “threads”, with as many as 3;072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads.
We have also built a neurosurgical robot capable of inserting six threads (192 electrodes) per minute. Each thread can be individually inserted into the brain with micron precision for avoidance of surface vasculature and targeting specific brain regions. The electrode array is packaged into a small implantable device that contains custom chips for low-power on-board amplification and digitization: the package for 3;072 channels occupies less than (23 × 18:5 × 2) mm3. A single USB-C cable provides full-bandwidth data streaming from the device, recording from all channels simultaneously. This system has achieved a spiking yield of up to 85:5 % in chronically implanted electrodes. Neuralink’s approach to BMI has unprecedented packaging density and scalability in a clinically relevant package. "

 Source: Gizmodo, Neuralink, Road to VR