Elon Musk’s brain technology startup, Neuralink, said Wednesday that an issue cropped up with its first human brain implant weeks after it was inserted into a patient.
The company revealed in a blog post that in the weeks following the patient’s surgery in January, a number of the implant’s connective threads retracted from the brain, causing a reduction in the signals the device could capture.
Neuralink provided few other details about the problem and did not disclose what might have caused the threads to retract.
It did say, however, that it modified an algorithm “to be more sensitive to neural population signals,” meaning it was able to improve how the patient’s brain signals were detected and translated.
It is not the first device implanted in the brain
Decades of research and lofty ambitions to meld minds with computers
Neuralink also uses innovative robotic surgery, rather than a specialized neurosurgeon, to implant the device.
“That’s way different from what people have done before,” said Sergey Stavisky, an assistant professor in the Department of neurological surgery at the University of California, Davis, and co-director of the UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab.
Stavisky said automating the procedure with a robot could make it more efficient and effective down the road.
There are many other companies developing brain interfaces.
The process requires electrodes to be inserted in the brain, a communication link, a computer algorithm which interprets what a micro electroencephalogram detects from the brain.
The technique can also be applied to vision
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