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{369} | ||
We have found the following types of neurons during acute intraoperative recrodings from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) of awake parkinson's patients. During the surgeries the patients opened and closed their hand, instrumented through a virtual-reality data glove, in order to move a cursor to randomly presented targets in a 1-dimensional field.
This plot shows a neuron which fires preferentially when a target appears and the patient moves to the left (again, in this graph: y = -1 indicates target appears to the left, + 1 target to the right, and 0 otherwise). Note that there is noticable oscillations, due to the fact that the patient's behavior was very periodic, with a period of around 2 seconds. The neuron was inhibited around the instant of target apperance, independent of direction, as indicated by the blue regions at y = -1 and 1 around lag 0.
This plot shows a neuron which is inhibited just before target apperance (in this plot, y = 1 400ms around target appearance, independent of direction). That is, the neuron stops firing upon sucessful completion of a movement. This neuron shows no pathological oscillatory tuning; therefore, it might be assumed that not all of the STN is incapacitated by Parkinson's disease.
Here is another example of a neuron that does not show oscillatory firing behavior. In this graph, y = 1 when the patient is opening or closing his hand (equivalently the cursor velocity exceeds a threshold); y = 0 otherwise. This neuron is therefore inhibited during periods of movement. Note that around a lag of 2.5 seconds, the neuron has a higher probability of firing (the red region), possibly indicating positive firing upon successful completion of a movement.
Another example of a neuron that is tuned to thresholded cursor velocity, though this time, the firing rate becomes positive just around the instant of movement. Note here there is evidence of highly periodic behavior, as seen in the green/yellow regions spaced about 1.6 seconds apart along y=1. The region at lag = 1.6 secons corresponds to the movement following target acquisition, hence exhibits a higher firing rate.
This neuron, like the one above, fires strongly whenever the hand moves. Interestingly, there appeared to be no directional information in either of these cells.
Finally, we discovered that there appears to be error-correlated firing within the STN. The neuron shown above is selectively inhibited around periods where the cursor and target positions differ. In the plot above y=1 indicates the absolute value of the target position - the cursor position exceeds a threshold of 20% of the total range (this is subtly different from the target apperance signal, as the patient can over shoot or under shoot the target position with the cursur, upon which this signal will be 1. | ||
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PMID-16859758 Brain-machine interfaces: past, present and future.
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Nathan, Misha, and their lives went to Japan for a week to work with the roboticists @ ATR. During the off time, they spent time exploring and photographing Japan. Misha lent me his camera to video record Clementine, and in the process of trying to free up space in the camera's memory, I found these excellent pictures taken by (presumably) Misha. There were other very nice pictures, but they contain Misha, Nathan etc so I excluded them. the photo below is by far the best. |