Engineering Better Brain Implants for the Future of Medicine Patrick J. Rousche, Ph.D. Bioengineering, and co-PI Laxman Saggere, Ph.D. Mechancial Engineering

Prime Grant Support: National Science Foundation Career Award and National Institutes of Health R21…>

Problem Statement and Motivation

Key Achievements and Future Goals

• The complex neural tissue of the brain is the source or destination for almost all motor and sensory information in the human body

• Therefore, multi-channel electrode interfaces with the brain hold great potential as a therapeutic tool for a number of clinical conditions such as paralysis, blindness, and deafness

• The architecture of the brain presents an incredible biological, chemical and mechanical design challenge for engineers designing such interfaces

• Development of a cell-culture test chamber

• Demonstration of sensory and motor brain signal recording in awake and behaving rats

• Beginning of a related study to study stroke in collaboration with the UIC Department of Neurosurgery

• Extension of the animal work into bio-robotics

• Presentations at IEEE-EMBS (Engineering in Medicine and Biology) conferences

• Future: Engineering analysis and design study for optimization of an electrode design suitable for human auditory cortex to treat deafness in humans

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Microneurosurgery

Electrophysiology

Technical Approach

Animal Behavior

Device Manufacture

• Bio-inspired design. By incorporating biocompatible materials and biological surface coatings, brain implants capable of long-term survival and function may be possible. ?

• Mechanically-compatible design. Further improvements to implant performance may come from the novel use of flexible implant materials.

•Flexible, biocompatible, electrode arrays are developed in the MAL and tested in a rat model.

• Neural cell culture is also used in the initial design phase to better understand the interactions at the neuron-device interface.

First Responder Pathogen Detection System (FiRPaDS) Investigator: Bhaskar DasGupta, Computer Science

Prime Grant Support: NSF (including a CAREER grant)

Problem Statement and Motivation

Technical Approach Key Achievements and Future Goals

• Need to identify unknown virus sequences during events such as epidemic or biological warfare

• We only have a database of known virus sequences

• Few complications of the real-world problem:

• Sequence has mutated (possibly maliciously)

• Impossibility to obtain entire DNA sequence

• Sample may be contaminated and/or contains mixture of sequences.

• Rapid amplification of the collected genetic material, e.g., via degenerate oligonucleotide primer based multiplex PCR

• A pathogen fingerprinting and/or barcoding component built around universal DNA tag arrays

• Rapid and robust computational procedures to compute barcodes that produces short signatures of sequences

• Two possible approaches to design FiRPaDS:

• Target based FiRPaDS

• Primer based FiRPaDS

• Developed efficient barcoding algorithms using combinatorial techniques

• Will extend barcoding approaches for more complicated scenarios such as mixture of samples

• Will generate an efficient solution for a combinatorial or graph-theoretic formulation for the degenerate multiplexed PCR minimization problem

• Will investigate applications of universal DNA tag arrays for helpful coordination with barcoding or fingerprinting steps