[keepmesmall]

I was hoping for a Hellraiser-looking network of pins sticking into the skull, but they actually sew right into the brain-skull membrane!

Why exactly is this necessary? Does this fulfill an existing need or does it require a few decades of dystopia before reaching maturity?

[mattkrause]

This is mostly meant for neuroscience research in animals.

The brain contains about 86B neurons, which use chemical and electrical signals to process information. Neuroscientists want to know what these cells are doing in healthy brains, and how that processing and signalling goes wrong in diseases. One way--arguably the best way--to do this is to implant animals with electrodes that record activity of nearby neurons, and see how it varies during different conditions (different behaviors, sensory inputs, drug treatments, etc). For obvious reasons, this should be as humane and non-invasive as possible, thus...this.

Humans also occasionally get electrodes implanted, either for deep brain stimulation (the most effective treatment for Parkinson's Disease) or to find the source (focus) of epileptic activity in the brain. This could potentially help with that too, though the deep brain targets are much, much further into the brain than the results reported here.

[mattkrause]

To elaborate a little bit more, brain activity can be measured non-invasively with things like EEG, MEG, fMRI, or fNIRS. However, these only let you look at the average activity of fairly large groups of neurons. EEG and MEG directly measures the neurons’ activity, and so have excellent temporal resolution, but their spatial specificity is pretty bad: EEG detects the electrical activity directly, but it’s smeared out by the skull and scalp; MEG avoids this by measuring magnetic fields, but can only sense them when they’re in certain orientations relative to the detectors, which limits where you can record on a curved, wrinkly brain. fMRI and fNIRS don’t sense the activity directly, but instead measure changes in blood flow/oxygenation that are related to neural activity. This is slower (by seconds) but has good spatial resolution. Thus, there’s not really an alternative for these invasive recordings...

[timlarshanson]

> This is mostly meant for neuroscience research in animals.

Exactly! And thank you, nice summary.

It should be noted, with respect to other comments here as well, that in animals the cranial vault re-closes 4-8 weeks after a craniotomy/craniectomy (rats). Dead neurons basically never grow back. Hence 'minimally invasive' refers to the attempt to minimize the brain insult and injury.

[mattkrause]

A nice paper deserves a nice summary! I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes, as Utah arrays have been around for ~25 years and haven’t changed much.