We all know that the difficulty many of us with multiple sclerosis have walking can be caused by lesions that damage the nerves along the spinal cord. What if an electronic bridge could be built to carry nerve impulses over those damaged areas? That concept is being investigated as a way to help people who’ve been paralyzed by a spinal cord injury. Could it also apply to people with MS?
An article published on May 24 in Nature reports on how scientists in Switzerland have created a “digital bridge” to allow a man to walk again after a 2011 motorcycle accident paralyzed him from the waist down. Not only that, according to a story in the The New York Times, a year after receiving the brain and spinal implants that created the bridge, the man can stand, get in and out of a car, and walk up a steep ramp with the help of a walker. He’s also showing signs that his central nervous system is recovering, by walking with crutches even when the implants are powered off.
The digital bridge’s artificial intelligence and radio signals
The system being used to accomplish this improvement involves recording brain activity and then using those signals to stimulate the spinal cord. To accomplish this, wireless implants were placed in the patient’s skull and spine. An artificial intelligence thought decoder detects walking desires that are generated in specific parts of the patient’s brain and matches them with the muscles needed to do that walking. A radio signal is sent between the implants, which stimulates those muscles to move. These signals occur every 300 milliseconds.
“We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan [Gert-Jan Oskam, the patient], and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Grégoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist who helped lead the research, told The Times.
But this feat isn’t easy to accomplish. The treatment requires multiple surgeries and hours of physical therapy. As pictured in the study, the patient must wear a headset and a backpack device that carries radio receivers, transmitters, and an AI processing unit.
Would it work for someone with MS?
Could this method someday help someone with MS to walk? That’s hard to say. The Swiss researchers say their system won’t fix all spinal cord paralysis, but as a nonscientist, I have to wonder why a similar device couldn’t be developed that would. It was only a little over three years ago that scientists at Duke University were using rats to experiment with transmitting sensory signals between the brain and the spinal cord. Imagine what might be happening in this field four or five years from now.
Perhaps MS presents too many damaged areas on the spinal cord to be spanned, and I’m sure other obstacles will have to be overcome. Right now, a robotlike exoskeleton is being used for gait training with some MS patients, but it’s an external device.
It’d be nice to devote more MS research time and money to creating technology, such as this digital bridge. I don’t know if it’s happening, but please let me know if it is. I’d like to write about it.
(This post first appeared as my column on the MS News Today website.)
(Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.)
