The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant’s brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.
It’s unclear what caused the threads to become “retracted” from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars.
The goal is for the threads to be placed near neurons of interest so that signals detected by the electrodes can be recorded and decoded into intended actions, such as moving a cursor on a computer screen.
On January 28, the company announced that it has surgically implanted its brain-computer interface into its first clinical trial participant, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who developed quadriplegia after a 2016 diving accident.
It remains unclear why the threads moved from their placement, but one hypothesis that sources told the Journal is that there was air trapped inside Arbaugh’s skull after the surgery, a condition called pneumocephalus.
However, the company reported that the retraction of the threads lowered his bits-per-second (BPS) rate, which is used to measure how quickly and accurately a patient with an implant can control a computer cursor.
The Journal reported that the company has told the Food and Drug Administration—which regulates clinical trials and granted approval for Neuralink to test its device in humans—that it believes it has fixes for the problem.
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