Your Next Surgeon May Be Robot.

Carnegie-Mellon University has developed a snake-like robot called the CardioArm. It is inserted into an incision in the chest and is then guided by joystick. The robot’s “head” has both a camera and end effectors capable of performing cardiac ablation, a procedure that delivers electrical pulses to the heart and can destroy problematic tissue.

In 2006 an Italian man in Milan had heart surgery performed by an autonomous robot. The surgery was initiated and monitored by a surgeon in Boston, but the robot performed the surgery without further intervention. Knee surgery[video] is often performed by a doctor sitting at a console and manipulating a 3D image.

Robots are not just getting smarter, they’re getting smaller. Brain researchers use tiny gene probes that seek out specific areas of the brain, allowing an fMRI to monitor activity. They enter the body as eyedrops. “Liu and his colleagues hitched a common MRI probe to a DNA sequence….” The military has developed a surgical robot small enough to carry into battlezones. The robot is controlled remotely by a surgeon in a safe location. Nanoparticles[video] can be guided to specific areas in the body where they release microdoses of drugs. Since the drugs are delivered directly to the problem area the doses can be as much as one thousand times lower.

[Obligatory grovel]
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

Speaking Without Voice

I recall hearing about this tech a few years ago. When one “pronounces” words in their head the vocal chords are activated to a minute degree. The idea is to capture the neurological signals on their way to the vocal cords and send them to a speech processor. At the time they were only able to distinguish “yes” from “no”.  A company called Ambient now has a device call Audeo. The sensor is built into a thin, easily donned neckband, making the person look like they are wearing a turtleneck collar. Audeo can currently recognize about 150 words.

Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation likens their progress to the early days of speech recognition. Given the acceleration of technological development we can expect a cheap commercial version of Audeo in about 5 years. Ten years ago commercial speech recognition software was expensive ($400-$1500), needed a powerful computer and required each-word-be-spoken-discreetly. Today, the average home computer can run continuous speech recognition software for $99. In fact, if you try to use discrete speech today, you’ll just confuse the program.

This new tech get surprisingly close to telepathy, although it should be noted that it cannot read thoughts (you need an fMRI for that). It takes a fair amount of concentration and can only read words that are intended to be spoken. Still, once these words are digitized they become just another packet of data, able to be transmitted or manipulated like any other. Imagine a crowded room where everyone has a cellphone and bluetooth headset. Twenty conversations could be occurring at the same time but an observer would see a room of silent, blankly staring people.

Let’s hope they can do some work on vocal nuance or in ten years we’re all going to sound like Stephen Hawking.

A Brain The Size Of A Tractor

Researchers in Switzerland are collaborating with IBM to build a brain inside of a computer. The Blue Brain, a variant of IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer, can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. These operations will be used to model the biological behavior of individual neurons, modeling a brain from the bottom up.

Begun in 2005, the project has just completed its feasibility phase. Most of its critics fell silent when they were able to simulate a rat’s neurocortical column. This structure is one of the repeating functional units of the neocortex. The model contained 10.000 neurons with 30 million synaptic connections.

[An entire neocortical column lights up with electrical activity. Modeled on a two-week-old rodent brain, this 0.5 mm by 2 mm slice is the basic computational unit of the brain and contains about 10,000 neurons. This microcircuit is repeated millions of times across the rat cortex and many times more in the brain of a human. Courtesy of Alain Herzog/EPFL (via www.SeedMagazine.com - mugly)]

 

This reductionist approach differs from the functional models used by most researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and computational neuroscience. “What they typically do is begin with a brain function they want to model and then try to see if they can get a computer to replicate that function,” says Henry Markof, director of the Blue Brain Project. He continues, “These models might help us think about the brain, but they don’t really help us understand it. If you want your model to represent reality, then you’ve got to model it on reality.”

The computational demands for this model are incredibly high. A single neuron requires 400 independent simulations. A rat’s brain has about 200 million neurons. Compare that to a human brain which has between 50 and 100 billion neurons, or 500 times that of a rat.

Markham hopes to have a rat brain modeled in a few years, a human brain in ten. It may be both sooner and later than that. Ray Kurzweil observed that scientists are often too optimistic in the long run, but too pessimistic in the short run, In other words, short term projections are often too long, and long term projections too short.

Blue Brain Project at IBM
Article at Seed Magazine
Article at Technology Review

Treating the Brain Without Drugs or Surgery

A technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has been shown to alleviate short term memory loss resulting from loss of sleep. The device consists of a base unit about the size of a desktop computer and a handheld wand. This same device is being used to treat depression. Columbia University conducted the study on memory and sleep deprivation. They hope their findings will lead to treatments for memory loss due to aging.