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Projects

1. NeuroTelemetry: Digital-Radio Transmission of Neuronal Signals

http://www.sissa.it/cns/tactile/neurotelemetry

Recording and measurement of the electrical impulses of neurons plays a fundamental role in laboratory research as well as in the clinical enviroment. In the laboratory, the study of neuronal activity in the animal subjects allows researchers to investigate the working mechanisms of the brain. In the clinic, the same approach offers the hope of understanding the fundamental bases of brain pathologies and to create innovative therapies againts them.

NeuroTelemetry, Patent Pending #PD2006A000348 of date 21 Sep 2006 - italian patent office, European Patent Pending PCT/EP2007/060053 (PCT application number) - 279056 (submission number) of date 21 Sep 2007, is a SISSA-IIT project with two fundamental aims: (1) Development of a technical instrument for the acquisition of neuronal signals and their wireless transmission to a remote receiver, (2) Development of new understanding regarding the mechanism of neuronal coding in cerebral cortex.

(1) Monitoring of neuronal activity from awake, freely moving animals will be significantly improved by the implementation of small, lightweight, battery-powered implantable devices that can amplify brain signals and transmit them to a remote unit. Such devices will also have clear clinical implications by forming the core structure in a Brain Computer Interface. NeuroTelemetry is a head-mounted device for transmitting signals and to a remote unit. Size and weight are the principal constraints. For our device we selected a real-time decoding architecture, as opposed to a data logging approach. An activity processor transmits the acquired waveform, leaving spike clustering and sorting tasks to the remote host. A novel aspect of NeuroTelemetry is a fully digitally programmable analog front end. Filter and amplification parameters can be remotely selected by the user and retuned as necessary throughout the experiment via a wireless link. The CPU-programmable analog front end also allows the scaling of the signal to optimally span the full range of an ADC converter. Special attention has been paid to the power saving requirements: the device can provide up to 2-hr. The receiver is connected to a PC and the acquisition process is real-time controlled and monitored by an application, including a virtual oscilloscope. The Year 1 milestone of testing and using of Neurotelemetry in freely moving laboratory rats has been accomplished.

(2) Any interface between the nervous system and external devices must be based on the correct understanding of the brain’s coding of information. In NeuroTelemetry-associated basic research, the laboratory has concentrated on understanding the neuronal coding of sensory experience. We have focussed on sense of touch in the rat whisker system, and the principal achievment is the discovery of the neuronal activity in cortex underlying texture discrimination. Rats and mice palpate objects with their whiskers to generate tactile sensations. This form of “active sensing” endows the animals with fast and accurate texture discrimination capacities. Our projects are aimed at understanding the nature of the underlying cortical signals.

Role in the project:

- Hardware & software designer (in collaboration with Igor Perkon)

- Experimenter (in collaboration with Igor Perkon, Mathew Diamon, Pavel Itskov and Natalia Grion)

- Inventor (in collaboration with Mathew E. Diamond and Igor Perkon)

Partners:

1: SISSA - Scuola Internazionale Superiore Studi Avanzati (Trieste - ITALY) - Tactile Perception & Learning Laboratory

http://www.sissa.it/cns/tactile

2. BIOTACT: BIOmmimetic Technology for vibrissal ACtive Touch

http://www.biotact.org

Closing your eyes and exploring your surroundings with your fingertips provides an experience that is rich and immediate. While vision supplies information about distant objects, touch is invaluable in sensing the nearby environment. However, in designing intelligent, life-like machines, such as robots, the touch modality has been largely overlooked; current systems make only limited use of tactile sensors for simple tasks such as detecting physical contact. Biology, by contrast, reveals an abundant use of tactile sensing in the animal kingdom. Indeed, in nocturnal creatures, or those that inhabit poorly-lit places, touch is widely preferred to vision as a primary means of discovering the world. The tactile senses of many mammals are built around arrays of facial hairs known as "whiskers" or "vibrissae". In this project we will develop new technologies inspired by the whisker morphology and neural processing systems of two such tactile specialists: the Norwegian rat and the Etruscan shrew.

black_rat

Tactile specialist: The laboratrory rat.

screw

Tactile specialist: The etruscan shrew.

These animals sweep their whiskers back and forth at high speeds in a controlled and feedback-sensitive manner. This “active touch” capacity allows them to: (i) maximise their intake of useful information; (ii) solve perceptual tasks such as determining the position, shape, and surface texture of encountered objects; (iii) encode tactile memories that allow recognition of familiar items; and (iv) track and capture prey animals using touch signals alone. Using our understanding of these natural vibrissal systems we will develop two biomimetic artefacts endowed with similar sensing capabilities: a novel active tactile sensing array, termed a BIOTACT sensor, with many hundreds of whisker-like sensing elements; and an autonomous whiskered robot that can seek-out, identify, and track fast-moving target objects.