Überwältigende Wissenschaft: Hologramme im „Star Wars-Stil“ zur Kommunikation mit dem Gehirn

>A trio of scientists at UC Berkeley are taking brain–machine interfaces to a new level, with a powerful platform that incorporates optogenetics and computer-generated holography in a way that shows promise as a high-throughput, high-precision technique for communication with the brain. The scientists believe it could become a powerful research tool for understanding how the brain is wired and could eventually be used to design therapies to treat brain diseases and disorders rooted in the malfunction of neural circuits.

>This system draws on the collective expertise of Laura Waller, an expert in computational imaging; Rikky Muller, whose lab focuses on microelectronics for neural interfaces; and Hillel Adesnik, a professor of neurobiology who studies the neural basis of perception. Waller and Adesnik are Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco Investigators, and overlapped with Muller, who is now an alum of the Biohub Investigator Program.

>Adesnik has dubbed the system a “Hubble telescope for the brain.” Just as the Hubble captures activity in space, the team’s neurotechnology would enable a view into brain activity at an unprecedented level of resolution. But unlike the Hubble, the system would do more than just track signals from neurons; it would also allow researchers to activate them, a two-way communication with the brain that promises to be a key enabling tool for neuroscience.

>“We’re developing an instrument that’s going to be able to literally illuminate how diseases – and really all normal functions – form and evolve in the brain,” Muller says.

>Other methods have been developed for optical neural interfacing at single-cell resolution, such as by 3D scanning, but these techniques have their limitations.

>“Most systems use one laser beam and scan in a grid pattern, but most of the time is wasted in the brain because the neurons are not sitting in a nice 2D plane – they’re in 3D, and there’s space between them,” Adesnik explains. “With our approach, we don’t need to waste time moving a beam. We can take a single laser and essentially diffract the beam, turning it into the right three-dimensional pattern, shaped to all the neurons exactly where they are. It’s like the 3D holographic displays in ‘Star Wars’ – that’s a real thing. And then you’re getting all that information in parallel.”