An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform With Thousands of Channels

By E. Musk. bioRxiv, 2019

994 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a7abe2d6d4ad03fa8dfaf8325cb1b00b56f48dce

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Scalable Bayesian GPFA with automatic relevance determination and discrete noise models (2021, neutral): “to brain-computer interfaces in human subjects [21, 40, 56].”
The rise of artificial intelligence in healthcare applications (2020, background): “This is rather similar to the goals of the company Neuralink which aims to bring the fields of material science, robotics, electronics, and neuroscience together to try and solve multifaceted health problems [49].”
3D-printed multifunctional materials enabled by artificial-intelligence-assisted fabrication technologies (2020, neutral): “Panel h (right) reprinted from reF.(213),”
High-performance brain-to-text communication via handwriting (2021, background): “New developments are under way for implant designs that increase the electrode count by at least an order of magnitude, which will further improve performance and longevity 35,36,40,41 .”
Current Status, Challenges, and Possible Solutions of EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface: A Comprehensive Review (2020, background): “It builds arrays of small and ﬂexible electrode “threads,” with as many as 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads Musk (2019).”
Review of Multimodal Data Acquisition Approaches for Brain–Computer Interfaces (2024, unknown): “Such utilities are as varied as academic endeavors to commercial memory storage devices currently initiated by Neuralink [6] to understand and abet in curing diseases and disabilities of the brain.”
A scalable platform for acquisition of high-fidelity human intracranial EEG with minimal clinical burden (2024, unknown): “While other EEG recording approaches are actively in development, intracranial EEGs from seizure localization studies strike a good balance between signal quality and long-term monitoring to continue pursuing neuroscience questions [55, 56].”