Second Human Neuralink Brain Implant Recipient Uses It For CAD And Videogaming

August 22, 2024 by Maya Posch 55 Comments

As Neuralink works towards getting its brain-computer interface technology approved for general use, it now has two human patients who have received the experimental implant. The second patient, [Alex], received the implant in July of 2024 and is said to be doing well, being able to play games like Counter Strike 2 without using his old mouth-operated controller. He’s also creating designs in Fusion 360 to have them 3D printed.

This positive news comes after the first patient ([Noland Arbaugh]) suffered major issues with his implant, with only 10-15% of the electrodes still working after receiving the implant in January. The issue of electrode threads retracting was apparently a known issue years prior already.

We analyzed Neuralink’s claims back in 2019, when its founder – [Elon Musk] – was painting lofty goals for the implant, including reading and writing of brains, integration with AIs and much more. Since that time Neuralink has been mostly in the news for the many test animals which it euthanized during its test campaign prior to embarking on its first human test subjects.

There also appears a continuing issue with transmitting the noisy data from the electrodes, as it is far more data than can be transmitted wirelessly. To solve this seemingly impossible problem, Neuralink has now turned to the public with its Neuralink Compression Challenge to have someone make a miraculous lossless compression algorithm for it.

With still many challenges ahead, it ought to be clear that it will take many more years before Neuralink’s implant is ready for prime-time, but so far at least it seems to at least make life easier for two human patients.

Continue reading “Second Human Neuralink Brain Implant Recipient Uses It For CAD And Videogaming” →

A giemsa stained blood smear from a person with beta thalassemia (Credit: Dr Graham Beards, Wikimedia Commons)

Potential Cure For All Of England’s Beta Thalassemia Patients Within Reach

August 10, 2024 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Beta thalassemia and sickle cell are two red blood cell disorders which both come with massive health implications and shortened lifespans, but at least for UK-based patients the former may soon be curable with a fairly new CRISPR-Cas9 gene therapy (Casgevy) via the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Starting with the NHS in England, the therapy will be offered to the approximately 460 β thalassemia patients in that part of the UK at seven different NHS centers within the coming weeks.

We previously covered this therapy and the way that it might offer a one-time treatment to patients to definitely cure their blood disorder. In the case of β thalassemia this is done by turning off the defective adult hemoglobin (HbA) production and instead turning the fetal hemoglobin (HbF) production back on. After eradicating the bone marrow cells with the defective genes, the (externally CRISPR-Cas9 modified) stem cells are reintroduced as with a bone marrow transplant. Since this involves the patient’s own cells, no immune-system suppressing medication is necessary, and eventually the new cells should produce enough HbF to allow the patient to be considered cured.

So far in international trials over 90% of those treated in this manner were still symptom-free, raising the hope that this β thalassemia treatment is indeed a life-long cure.

Top image: A giemsa stained blood smear from a person with beta thalassemia. Note the lack of coloring. (Credit: Dr Graham Beards, Wikimedia Commons)

The BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart: A Maglev Bridge To Life

July 28, 2024 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

The BiVACOR THA hooked up with the CTO Dianiel Timms in the background. (Credit: BiVACOR)

Outside of the brain, the heart is probably the organ that you miss the most when it ceases to function correctly. Unfortunately, as we cannot grow custom replacement hearts yet, we have to keep heart patients alive long enough for them to receive a donor heart. Yet despite the heart being essentially a blood pump, engineering even a short-term artificial replacement has been a struggle for many decades. A new contender has now arrived in the BiVACOR TAH (total artificial heart), which just had the first prototype implanted in a human patient.

Unlike the typical membrane-based pumps, the BiVACOR TAH is a rotary pump that uses an impeller-based design with magnetic levitation replacing bearings and theoretically minimizing damage to the blood. This design should also mean a significant flowrate, enough even for an exercising adult. Naturally, this TAH is only being tested as a bridge-to-transplant solution, for patients with a failing heart who do not qualify for a ventricular assist device. This may give more heart patients a chance to that donor heart transplant, even if a TAH as a destination therapy could save so many more lives.

The harsh reality is that the number of donor hearts decreases each year while demand increases, leading to unconventional approaches like xenotransplantation using specially bred pigs as donor, as well as therapeutic cloning to grow a new heart from the patient’s own cells. Having a universal TAH that could be left in-place (destination therapy) for decades would offer a solid option next to the latter, but remains elusive. As shown by e.g. the lack of progress with a TAH like the ReinHeart despite a promising 2014 paper in a bovine model.

Hopefully before long we’ll figure out a reliable way to fix this ‘just a blood pump’ in our bodies, regardless of whether it’s a biological or mechanical solution.

Software Bug Results In Insulin Pump Injuries, Spurs Recall

May 11, 2024 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Managing Type 1 diabetes is a high-stakes balancing act — too much or too little insulin is a bad thing, resulting in blood glucose levels that deviate from a narrow range with potentially dire consequences on either side. Many diabetics choose to use an insulin pump to make managing all this easier, but as a recent recall of insulin pump software by the US Food and Drug Administration shows, technology isn’t foolproof.

Thankfully, the recall is very narrow in scope. It’s targeted at users of the Tandem t:slim X2 insulin pump, and specifically the companion application running on iOS devices. The mobile app is intended to run on the user’s phone to monitor and control the pump. The pump itself is a small, rechargeable device that users often keep on their belt or tucked into a pocket that delivers a slow, steady infusion of insulin during the day, plus larger bolus doses to compensate for meals.

But version 2.7 of the t:connect mobile app can crash unexpectedly, and on iOS devices, that can lead to the OS continually relaunching it. Each time it does this, the app tries to reconnect with the pump via Bluetooth, which eventually runs down the battery in the pump. Once the battery is dead, no more insulin can be delivered, potentially leading to a condition called hyperglycemia (“hyper” meaning an excess, “gly” referring to sugar, and “emia” meaning presence in blood — excess sugar in the blood.)

Untreated hyperglycemia can progress to a much more serious state called diabetic ketoacidosis, which can lead to coma and death. Thankfully, nobody has suffered that fate from this bug, but the FDA has received over 200 reports of injuries, hence the recall. Tandem sent out a notice to all affected customers back in March to update their apps, but it’s still possible that some users didn’t get the message.

Apart from the human cost of this bug, there’s a lesson here about software design and unintended consequences. While it intuitively seems like a great idea to automatically relaunch a crashed app, especially one with a critical life-safety function, in hindsight, the better course might have been to just go into a safe mode and alert the user with an alarm. That’s a lesson we’ve learned by exploring space, and it seems to apply here as well.

Images: AdobeStock, Tandem Diabetes

Experiencing Visual Deficits And Their Impact On Daily Life, With VR

March 29, 2024 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

Researchers presented an interesting project at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces: it uses VR and eye tracking to simulate visual deficits such as macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and other visual diseases and impairments.

Typical labels and pill bottles can be shockingly inaccessible to a variety of common visual deficits.

VR offers a unique method of allowing people to experience the impact of living with such conditions, a point driven home particularly well by having the user see for themselves the effect on simple real-world tasks such as choosing a pill bottle, or picking up a mug. Conditions like macular degeneration (which causes loss of central vision) are more accurately simulated by using eye tracking, a technology much more mature nowadays than it was even just a few years ago.

The abstract for the presentation is available here, and if you have some time be sure to check out the main index for all of the VR research demos because there are some neat ones there, including a method of manipulating a user’s perception of the shape of the ground under their feet by electrically-stimulating the tendons of the ankle.

Eye tracking is in a few consumer VR products nowadays, but it’s also perfectly feasible to roll your own in a surprisingly slick way. It’s even been used on jumping spiders to gain insights into the fascinating and surprisingly deep perceptual reality these creatures inhabit.

3D Printed Pelvis And Femur Implants For Bone Cancer Treatment

February 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

On December 22nd of 2023, a Vietnamese patient underwent hours-long surgery in order to remove part of his pelvis and femur, as per the usual treatment for bone cancer. What was special here was that the bone was replaced with 3D-printed replicas, to restore the shape and function of the parts that were removed. A long time before this surgery, [Mr. Le Dinh Thuan] was diagnosed with lung cancer, for which he received surgery. Yet not long after this surgery it was discovered due to sudden hip pain that the cancer had spread to one hip joint, which is quite uncommon, but requires that the affected bone is removed. This replacement with a prosthetic was a first for cancer treatments in Vietnam. Continue reading “3D Printed Pelvis And Femur Implants For Bone Cancer Treatment” →

Simulating Cellular Biology In The Browser

January 21, 2024 by Al Williams 7 Comments

[Technistuff] read a paper about simulating a “minimal” cell — apparently a cell with only 493 genes. This led to a goal: reproduce the simulation in TypeScript so it can run in a web browser. Why? We don’t know, but it is an interesting look at both in-depth biology and how to handle complex simulations. The code is available on GitHub.

For a point of reference, E. Coli has over 4,500 genes. The cell in question — JCVI-syn3A — actually has seven more genes than truly necessary. The data for this bacteria is available from a research lab, again, using GitHub.

Continue reading “Simulating Cellular Biology In The Browser” →