Stabilization of a Brain-computer Interface Via the Alignment of Low-dimensional Spaces of Neural Activity

Overview

Journal Nat Biomed Eng

Publisher Springer Nature

Specialty Biomedical Engineering

Date 2020 Apr 22

PMID 32313100

Citations 58

Authors

Alan D Degenhart

William E Bishop

Emily R Oby

Elizabeth C Tyler-Kabara

Steven M Chase

Aaron P Batista

Byron M Yu

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The instability of neural recordings can render clinical brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) uncontrollable. Here, we show that the alignment of low-dimensional neural manifolds (low-dimensional spaces that describe specific correlation patterns between neurons) can be used to stabilize neural activity, thereby maintaining BCI performance in the presence of recording instabilities. We evaluated the stabilizer with non-human primates during online cursor control via intracortical BCIs in the presence of severe and abrupt recording instabilities. The stabilized BCIs recovered proficient control under different instability conditions and across multiple days. The stabilizer does not require knowledge of user intent and can outperform supervised recalibration. It stabilized BCIs even when neural activity contained little information about the direction of cursor movement. The stabilizer may be applicable to other neural interfaces and may improve the clinical viability of BCIs.

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