Just six months after the first implant, Elon Musk’s Neuralink has successfully implanted a chip into a second paralysed patient’s brain, the procedure having gone “extremely well”, and with more procedures planned for this year.
Musk said the patient appears to have fully recovered and has seen no adverse effects yet. He notes that the patient can currently move a mouse on the screen just by thinking about it, reports CCN.
“I don’t want to jinx it but … there’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well,” he said, adding that the patient had a spinal cord injury similar to the first patient, Noland Arbaugh.
The chip is inserted into the brain with 64 electrode-containing threads, which act as the link between the chip and the brain, which then connects to an app that allows users to control devices.
Musk noted that 400 of the 1 024 electrodes in the second patient’s brain were working.
The Neuralink team says it will continue to advance the technology, adding faster chips, more electrodes, and potentially multiple implants.
The company aims to recruit another eight participants by the end of the year.
First trial
Noland Arbaugh was the first Neuralink PRIME Study participant, a quadriplegic who suffered a spinal injury during a diving accident, but who is now able to use computers, play video games, play chess, browse the internet, and more, just by thinking.
In a patient update in May this year, Neuralink noted that many electrodes wired into the patient’s brain had retracted during healing. Initially, the bits-per-second (BPS) cursor speed, the standard measure for cursor control speed and accuracy, fell.
But despite this setback, the Neuralink team was prompted to rework data compression algorithms and hit new records.
Musk said Arbaugh has achieved incredible feats, despite only 10% or 15% of the electrodes working – suggesting, he said, that Neuralink has yet to realise its full potential.
CCN article – Elon Musk’s Neuralink Successfully Implants Second Patient With Chip (Open access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
US lawmaker probes FDA inspection of Musk’s Neuralink
Neuralink’s first human patient controls computer mouse via thought
Step forward in human studies for Neuralink brain implants