Zhejiang University: first Chinese human Utah-array implant, robotic arm control, 2020
Lab or organization
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Zhejiang University: first Chinese human Utah-array implant, 2020
Zhejiang University announced on 16 January 2020 that its Qiushi Academy for Advanced Studies brain-computer interface team and the Department of Neurosurgery at the Second Affiliated Hospital had completed what it called the first implanted BCI clinical study in China. This entry rests on the university’s Chinese news page, reprinted from Science and Technology Daily (17 January 2020). Neither a journal paper nor an ethics or registry number was found in that page.
Participant and hardware
A 72-year-old man who had a C4 cervical spinal cord injury in a car accident two years earlier, with all four limbs paralyzed. Two Utah arrays were inserted in the motor cortex. The release describes each array as 4 mm by 4 mm with 100 electrode pins, aimed at cortical layer 5. The release does not name the array manufacturer.
Surgery
A surgical robot with 0.1 mm step size placed the two arrays, with error held to within 0.5 mm according to the release. The team contrasted this with earlier half-implanted work that lays an electrode sheet on the cortical surface without penetrating it.
Decoding and tasks
Because signal quality in older participants is weaker, the team built a personalized nonlinear decoder and trained it with feedback learning for more than four months. The participant then controlled an external robotic arm and hand in three-dimensional space to drink, eat, shake hands and play mahjong, according to the release and the university’s related pages.
Limits
No decoding accuracy, trial counts, implant duration, safety follow-up or regulatory documentation is given in the release. Everything above is the institution’s own announcement.